This blog by Köksal Banoğlu explores how humility can act as a powerful enabler of intellectual stimulation and organisational learning in schools. Drawing on recent research into transformational leadership, the author examines why leadership confidence is most effective when grounded in relational trust rather than performative self-assurance. The piece offers a thoughtful, research-informed reflection with clear relevance for educational leaders, researchers, and policymakers.
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Giving fancy names to successive epochs has never lost its tempo. How educational leaders understand change is accordingly shaped by how societies describe historical moments, particularly through narratives of progress that promise innovation and advancement for schools. We seem irresistibly drawn to the idea that each century must be neatly branded, packaged, and shelved with a label that flatters our sense of progress. The nineteenth century, hailed as the “Machine Age” or the “Clockwork Era”, captured the mechanistic ambition of industrial capitalism, with clear ramifications for school systems (Senge et al., 2012). The twentieth century crowned itself the “Computer Age,” the “Information Age,” or whatever shiny concept best showcased humanity’s confidence in its own intellectual ascendancy. It became an era stamped with educational technologies that were widely oversold yet, as Cuban (2001) reminds us, remain questionably and unevenly integrated into schools.
And now the twenty-first century has arrived bearing even grander titles: “Posthuman Age,” “AI Century,” “Algorithmic Era.” Each name, grander than the last, attempts to capture our collective fantasy that we are living in an unprecedented moment, more enlightened and more advanced than anything before (Zizek, 2020). What if each name signals our inner ambitions and ongoing desire to believe we are living on a higher plane than our predecessors. Yet beneath these terminologies lies a simpler continuity, a constant and unbroken thread across centuries: the human ego, endlessly reinvented and endlessly triumphant.
So, within such a long story of inflated self-worth, who could be surprised that this egoism also permeates managerial mindsets, including those of educational leaders? Accordingly, school leadership discourse often elevates confidence and charisma, even framing the term arrogance as a necessary trait for being visionary, while humility alone appears almost antiquated, seemingly less “authentic” virtue, misplaced in modern professional life (Theoharis, 2008). But here the plot thickens, because emerging evidence from educational leadership research complicates this familiar narrative.
A Timely Reminder from Recent Research
Consider, for example, the recent work of Gümüş et al. (2025), which subtly reframes what leadership self-efficacy and actual effectiveness looks like in school settings. Drawing on data from 1,080 teachers and 31 principals in Hong Kong schools, the study examines how transformational leadership influences organisational learning, and crucially, how principals’ self-efficacy and teachers’ collective perceptions of their principal’s leadership performance shape this relationship. Their findings are strikingly human.
Across five core dimensions of transformational leadership (i.e. intellectual stimulation, idealised behaviour, idealised attributes, inspirational motivation, and individual consideration), teachers generally perceived positive associations with organizational learning. But the real insight lies in the variation: these effects are not uniform across schools, prompting the researchers to conduct a multilevel analysis.
Context and Perception Matter
Most compellingly, intellectual stimulation emerges as the only significant predictor of organizational learning in the multilevel model, especially when schoolwide perceived leadership and leader self-efficacy align, as illustrated in the meaningfully heart-shaped analytical model below.
In this model, the interaction effect (dashed line) accounts for the condition of both the principal genuinely possessing strong self-efficacy and teachers collectively recognising and endorsing the principal’s effectiveness in this specific dimension across schools. When these conditions align, the relationship between intellectual stimulation and teachers’ perception of organisational learning reaches its peak. By contrast, elevated self-efficacy alone, a form of overconfidence, can hamper the impact of intellectual stimulation on organisational learning.
This interplay exposes a truth we often overlook: leadership is not an arena for unchecked ego. It does not thrive on bravado. Instead, it flourishes when leaders cultivate self-belief grounded in authentic relational credibility, and their confidence resonates with, rather than overwhelms, the organisational community.
The implications are profound. Gümüş et al. (2025) remind us that cultivating supportive school environments, strengthening principals’ grounded self-efficacy, and nurturing teachers’ collective sense of their leader’s effectiveness are far more impactful than the heroic narratives leadership studies sometimes promote. For policymakers and practitioners, the message is clear: leadership is less about commanding transformation and more about co-creating it.
A Whisper of Hope in an Age of Overconfidence
This body of evidence disrupts the broader cultural rhythm of ego-driven epochs, at least in educational settings. While we keep naming centuries after our newest feats of dominance (mechanical, informational, algorithmic or whatsoever), educational leadership research introduces a quieter counterpoint. It suggests that humility, relational trust, and shared meaning still matter deeply.
So while it may seem that humility vanished long ago, drowned beneath the noise of technocratic self-assurance, studies like that of Gümüş et al. (2025) whisper otherwise: there remains a reservoir of depth in the human soul, implying a capacity for grounded confidence rather than inflated ego, for school leadership defined not by superiority but by humble communication. If intellectual stimulation is the engine of organisational learning, humility is its steering wheel. Without it, even the most confident leadership risks driving schools in the direction of performative cleverness.
Accordingly, educational leaders should practise grounded confidence by pairing intellectual stimulation with visible humility, ensuring that their self-belief is continually affirmed through teachers’ trust, dialogue, and shared sense-making. Educational policymakers, in turn, should redesign leadership standards and development frameworks to value relational credibility and perceptual alignment as essential capacities for sustainable school improvement.
Cuban L. (2001). Oversold and underused: Computers in the classroom. Harvard University Press.
Gümüş, S., Lu, J., Banoğlu, K., & Walker, A. D. (2025). From confidence to impact: How school leaders’ self-efficacy moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational learning in K-12 schools. Journal of Educational Administration. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-05-2025-0204
Senge, P. M., Cambron-McCabe, N., Lucas, T., Smith, B., Dutton, J., & Kleiner, A. (2012). Schools that learn: A fifth discipline fieldbook for educators, parents, and everyone who cares about education. Crown.
Theoharis, G. (2008). Woven in deeply: Identity and leadership of urban social justice principals: Identity and leadership of urban social justice principals. Education and Urban Society, 41(1), 3-25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013124508321372
Zizek, S. (2020). The apocalypse of a wired brain. Critical Inquiry, 46(4), 745–763. https://doi.org/10.1086/709222
