Leading for Innovation: Exploring School Leaders' Trust

School leadership plays a pivotal role in driving change and innovation in schools by facilitating communication and coordination among teaching staff, school supervisors, and educational authorities. In line with this notion, organizational trust emphasizes school leaders’ trust in key stakeholders, especially their staff, as a crucial antecedent for fostering co-construction, risk-taking, and openness to innovation. Self-efficacy, trust in oneself, has also been associated with school leaders’ engagement in innovative practices. This chapter examines how school leaders’ trust in key stakeholders (teaching staff, school supervisors, and educational administration) and their perceived Psychological Safety relate to their Innovation-related Self-Efficacy and subsequent engagement in exploratory and exploitative behaviours. Drawing on data from the School Leadership Monitor Austria (N = 1827) structural equation modelling is used to analyse these hypothesized relationships. Findings show that trust in teaching staff had the strongest total effect on leaders’ Innovation-related Self-Efficacy (β = 0.57), followed by perceived Psychological Safety (β = 0.37) and, to a lesser extent, Trust in Supervisors (β = 0.10), whereas Trust in Administration was not statistically significant. Innovation-related Self-Efficacy, in turn, accounts for the relationships between these antecedents and school leaders’ engagement in exploratory (β = 0.08) and exploitative (β = 0.22) behaviours, though the two forms show some tension (r = −0.49). These results underline the importance of trust-based relationships with internal stakeholders and a psychologically safe school culture as potential leverage points for activating leadership capacity to meet innovation demands within the educational governance system.