In the context of ongoing educational reform in the world, effective school leadership has become a national priority, highlighting the need for valid tools to assess principals’ self-efficacy. This study aimed to examine the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Principal Self-Efficacy Scale (PSES) among Vietnamese high school principals. A quantitative research design was employed using a sample of 155 school principals from the Mekong Delta region in Vietnam. Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were conducted to investigate the dimensionality and model fit of the PSES. The results supported a refined fifteen-item, three-factor model—comprising efficacy for management, efficacy for moral leadership, and efficacy for instructional leadership—with strong reliability and acceptable fit indices. In addition, the PSES showed significant correlations with the construct of work engagement, confirming its concurrent validity. The findings suggest that the PSES is a reliable and culturally appropriate instrument for evaluating principal self-efficacy. This validation provides important implications for leadership development, educational policy, and cross-cultural research in school leadership in the educational setting of Vietnam.
Tran et al. (Fri,) studied this question.