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We study the role of school climate, and teacher task, and citizenship performance in mediating the effects of principal instructional leadership behavior on student achievement.

Structural equation modeling was applied to data obtained from 302 Indian secondary schools to test a mediated-effects model.

School climate was examined under two broad dimensions, the social and affective and the physical environment. Results of mediation analysis showed that the benefits of principal instructional leadership for student achievement are operationalized as an indirect effect. This indirect effect is realized primarily through the physical environment, and the in-role task performance of teachers. No significant contribution to the indirect effect through the social and affective environment was found. The latter, nonetheless, fully mediated the relationship between the instructional leadership and extra-role or citizenship behavior of teachers. These findings underscore the different and distinct mediating roles played by the social and affective, and physical dimensions of the school climate in our model.

To the best of our knowledge, the reported associations between principal instructional leadership, school climate and student achievement that take into account both the in-role and extra-role job performance of teachers within the purview of a single framework are new. Also, this is the first study exploring these relations in an Indian context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of teacher job satisfaction and school climate in mediating the relative effects of principals’ instructional and transformational leadership practices on student outcomes.

Guided by strong evidence from theories on school leadership and work psychology, the authors hypothesized relations among dimensions of principals’ instructional and transformational leadership behaviors, teachers’ perception of the school climate (social and affective, and physical environment), their job satisfaction and student achievement. The benefits of the principal’s leadership behaviors for student achievement are primarily hypothesized as indirect, with either a weak or statistically non-significant direct positive effect on student outcomes. Path modeling was applied to validate a mediated-effects model using cross-sectional survey data (306 principals, 1,539 teachers) obtained from 306 secondary schools in the two Indian metropolitan cities of New Delhi and Kolkata.

Principal leadership behaviors were not associated directly with either teacher job satisfaction or school-aggregated student achievement. Rather, the transformational leader behavior showed an indirect effect, through the social and affective component of the school climate, on teacher job satisfaction. The physical climate, however, appeared to play a dominating role in mediating the instructional leadership effects on teacher job satisfaction. Comparing the relative indirect effect sizes of the instructional and transformational leadership behaviors on student achievement, principals appear to favor the former approach.

This study provides further empirical evidence that instructional leadership better captures the impact of school leadership on student outcomes, when compared to its transformational counterpart. By identifying the relative effects of different leadership practices, school leaders and educational practitioners can focus more on altering the distribution and frequency of those practices that work best for ameliorating student achievement levels.

Extant research on comparative advertising has focused only on “market leader” comparisons (a brand targeting the market leader), whereas in the marketplace, “multi-brand” comparisons are more prevalent (Kalro et al., 2010). Moreover, most research focuses on direct comparisons only. Hence, this research aims to investigate the interplay between comparison ad strategy (“market leader”/“multi-brand” comparisons) and comparison ad format (direct/indirect comparisons) on the effectiveness of comparative advertising.

This paper uses four 2 × 2 fully crossed factorial designs (comparison ad format: direct vs indirect and comparison ad strategy: market leader vs multi brand) with established and new brands in two categories: powdered detergents and smart phones. All studies were conducted in metropolitan cities of India.

By and large, the experiments indicated that direct (indirect) comparisons lowered (heightened) perceived manipulative intent and enhanced (reduced) attitude-toward-the-ad for multi-brand (market leader) comparisons.

Findings suggest that when advertisers use comparative advertising, they may use direct ads when using multi-brand comparisons and use indirect ones when using market leader comparisons. It could also be argued that when advertisers use multi-brand comparisons because of fragmentation in the marketplace, they may directly compare against these multiple brands. When advertisers need to compare against a market leader, they may do so indirectly.

This research is among the first to investigate multi-brand comparisons that are widely used in the industry and that too in the context of both direct and indirect comparison formats.