Autonomy-supportive leadership is defined by school leadership emphasizing practices that encourage active participation, input, and involvement from teachers, while making sure that any changes benefit each individual teacher, and address the needs of each teacher.

Teachers who perceive that their leaders are using autonomy-supportive techniques are much more likely to report greater buoyancy, less work stress, and less emotional exhaustion.  Comparatively, there tends to be a lot more research on autonomy-supportive leadership, and the study lists this as a limitation of the paper.

In this particular study, autonomy-supportive leadership was expected to be positively associated with workplace buoyancy and negatively associated with somatic outcomes.

Autonomy-Supportive Leadership

Autonomy-thwarting leadership practices are defined by controlling, domineering behavior by leadership, and insisting on compliance based on feelings of guilt and shame. 

A subsection of this style of leadership is “transactional leadership”, defined by ensuring compliance, and closely monitoring employee behavior, like autonomy-thwarting leadership, but mainly differs in the strong association with burnout among teachers, and its broader range as a concept, as it includes certain domineering factors that autonomy-thwarting leadership alone doesn't consider.

This study hypothesized that autonomy-thwarting leadership would leave teachers feeling unsupported and overwhelmed, leading to somatic stress.

Autonomy-Thwarting Leadership

This study uses two main styles of leadership to show the effects on teachers’ somatic stress:
- autonomy-supportive leadership
- autonomy-thwarting leadership

University of California, Davis

Hypothesized Model for COVID-19 and Somatic Burden Study

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2332858420986187

COVID-19 and Teachers’ Somatic Burden, Stress, and Emotional Exhaustion: Examining the Role of Principal Leadership and Workplace Buoyancy (Reference)

Two Leadership Models in COVID-19 and Somatic Burden Study

Workplace buoyancy is defined as a teachers’ personal resource used by the individual to help thwart or navigate challenges in the workplace. The study claims that this is different from the concept of resilience, because resilience generally refers to the ability to get through chronic or extremely difficult situations, while workplace buoyancy is simply the ability to successfully navigate everyday work challenges. Therefore, the main difference is in the degree of the challenge, and the relative recurrence of the same difficulties.

For example, during COVID-19, a main challenge for many teachers was having to rapidly adjust to online learning, figuring out how to navigate their work-home life now that they were in the same place, and learning how to accommodate diverse situations in students’ homes.

In past studies, workplace buoyancy has been shown to alleviate disengagement in work, and has been associated with lower ‘failure avoidance motivation’, which is defined as motivation driven solely by a personal fear of failure. 

This study hypothesized that workplace buoyancy would be negatively associated with the three dependent variables of the study: somatic burden, stress related to change, and emotional exhaustion, because teachers that had high workplace buoyancy would be able to navigate the difficult circumstances of COVID-19 and online learning.

Workplace Buoyancy

Three groups of background characteristics served as covariates in this study:
- gender, teaching experience, and school location
- teachers’ working situation during COVID-19
- Big Five personality domains of teachers

The Role of Teachers’ Background and External Characteristics in COVID-19 and Somatic Burden Study

To summarize, the study examined work-related outcomes of teachers and the role of two leadership factors, autonomy-supportive and thwarting, and workplace buoyancy on mental health outcomes: somatic burden, stress related to change, and emotional exhaustion. 

The styles of leadership were purported to be predictors of workplace buoyancy. The study also examined the interaction effect between the two different leadership styles to see whether the buffering and boosting processes identified in the JD-R model are true in this case. 

Finally, the study tested alternative models to see whether the hypothesized study model was the best way to examine the outcomes.

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