From pessimism to contribution: Understanding teacher agency through distributed leadership and ambidexterity- evidence from Türkiye

This study aims to identify teachers’ agency profiles and investigate how distributed leadership mediates the empirical link between organisational ambidexterity and teacher agency profiles. This cross-sectional study, which collected data from a sample of 504 teachers working in Ankara province, Türkiye, conducted latent profile analysis with mediation modeling to measure the structural linkages among the study variables. The results showed that the sampled teachers were categorised into three profiles: the engaged pessimist, the reluctant contributor, and the confident pessimist . We observed that most of the teachers were placed in the confident and pessimist profile. The study also provided evidence that distributed leadership significantly indirectly affects teacher agency profiles through ambidexterity. Our findings provide valuable insights that can inform both policy development and practical applications in the field.