The relationship between perceived transformational leadership and innovative work behaviour among high performing school teachers in Malaysia: leader member exchange and teacher self efficacy as mediators

Organizations face many opportunities and competition in today's world. They need to be different from each other to stay sustainable. Thus, this insistence demands organizations to increase their efficiency and effectiveness by strengthening the innovative behaviour of members in the organization including schools through effective transformational leadership and mediators including teacher self-efficacy and leader-member exchange. Unfortunately, the performance of the level of innovation in educational practice is still moderate at the international level. This connotes that teachers in schools should play a major role in ensuring that their practice is more significant in the complexity and uncertainty of the 21st century. Ironically, the innovative work behaviour of teachers in high-performing schools (HPS) is still an issue to this day. Based on the Grade Point Average (GPA) in the Malaysian Certificate of Education Examination for three consecutive years from 2017 to 2019, it is found that 69.9% HPS out of 23 schools in Cohorts 1 & 2 recorded an inconsistent position of GPA performance, only 30.4% HPS was able to maintain GPA position consistently during those three years. Thus, this study is conducted to examine the relationship between the Transformation Leadership of principals in HPS to innovative work behaviour of teachers through the role of intermediaries namely self-efficacy of teachers and leader-exchange of teachers in high performing schools, especially in the category of Boarding Schools based on the teacher perceptions. This quantitative study utilised group survey and sampling methods. The study population consists of teachers in high-performing schools (Boarding Schools). The study sample is a total of 352 HPS teachers. This study used Structural Equation Modelling analysis through the Partial Least Squared software (SmartPLS 3.0). The analysis of this study involved a Measurement Model to test the reliability, convergence validity, and discriminant validity of each construct. The Structuring Model was used to test all hypotheses. Bootstrapping method analysis has been implemented. The findings of the study found that there is a direct relationship between the Transformational Leadership of principals and the innovative work behaviour of teachers in terms of stimulating the intellectuals of SBT teachers. In addition, this study also found that teachers' self-efficacy serves as an indirect mediator to influence teachers' innovative behaviour through SBT principal transformation leadership in disseminating vision, fostering high-performance expectations, and stimulating SBT teachers' intellectuals. Meanwhile, the role of leader-member exchange, as an intermediary, was found to be able to influence the innovative behaviour of SBT teachers directly through the transformational leadership of the principal. On the other hand, the leader-member exchange is found to not be able to directly influence the innovative work behaviour of teachers. In conclusion, teachers' innovative work behaviour can be directly enhanced if principals provide adequate resources in terms of innovation budgets, expertise, create an environment that supports innovation policies in schools and are always transparent with their teachers. In addition, if the principal wants their teachers to innovate, they need to be role models in leading innovation in the school and be the one that provides many new ideas and generates many patents thus serving as role model for SBT teachers.