The Contingent Effects of School Leadership and Organizational Culture on Teacher Performance in Fragile Educational Systems

Persistent low teacher performance remains a critical obstacle to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) in fragile educational systems. While prior research is largely grounded in high-resource Western settings, it often overlooks the compensatory mechanisms that sustain instructional quality amid chronic resource scarcity and institutional instability. Situated within the field of educational administration in resource-scarce contexts, this study examines how transformational leadership and organizational culture influence teacher performance in rural Nigeria, with organizational trust and teacher engagement operating as parallel mediators. Survey data from 167 teachers, analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM), revealed strong direct effects of transformational leadership (β = 0.388) and organizational culture (β = 0.166) on teacher performance. Organizational trust (β = 0.161) and teacher engagement (β = 0.208) were also significant predictors. Mediation analysis showed that transformational leadership enhances performance through both trust and engagement, whereas organizational culture’s influence operates primarily through trust. The model demonstrated substantial explanatory power, accounting for 63.8% (R² = 0.638) of the variance in teacher performance, underscoring the critical role of internal school-level resources in compensating for material scarcity. These findings extend General Systems Theory and Social Exchange Theory by demonstrating how trust-based leadership and coherent organizational cultures stabilize instructional quality in fragile systems. For policymakers, the study underscores that strengthening organizational trust and engagement constitutes a sustainable strategy to buffer systemic weaknesses and accelerate progress toward SDG 4.