School As Learning Organisations: The Influence of Educational Leadership, Organisational Knowledge Circulation, and School Culture Over Teachers’ Job Satisfaction in Vietnamese K-12 Schools

The chaotic situation of today’s VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) and TUNA (Turbulent, Uncertain, Novel, Ambiguous) world is bringing more and more active and passive reforms, including positive and negative aspects, that reform business models. Educational institutions are not exceptional. Regarding the nature of educational institutions’ operation in today’s rapidly changing context, school leaders also need to raise concerns similar to those of business managers from other industries: “How do their institutions continuously renovate to adapt to tomorrow’s world?” Thus, based on organisational learning theories, this project aims to establish a framework to evaluate educational leadership’s influence on the organisational knowledge circulation effectiveness within the K-12 education context. The study combines a structured literature review, bibliometrics analysis, and high-order structural equation model analysis on the survey for teachers among Vietnamese public and private K-12 schools. First, this project proposed and validated a toolset to measure educational leadership as a combination of principalship and teacher leadership. Second, it revealed new insights about the impacts of educational leadership, knowledge circulation, and school culture on teachers’ job satisfaction. The project also offers insights into teachers’ professional development activities across various school types and grade levels in Vietnam, which contribute to further continuous renovation of Vietnamese K-12 schools, and diversify the corpus of educational leadership studies. This project’s results extended the applications of organisational learning theories in K-12 education, as well as can be adopted to establish further knowledge management frameworks in other settings such as higher education or vocational education.