Visionary School Leadership: Guiding Sustainable Development Through Leaders’ Personal Ethos Across Urban Areas

This study examines the moral mechanisms for sustainable development in schools by exploring how a leader’s personal ethos of authenticity, empathy, fairness, open-mindedness, collaboration, service, and resilience affects vision-led leadership learning to motivate school reform across urban areas in Northern Taiwan. In the context of vision-led leadership learning, a leader’s personal ethos is viewed as the core, serving as a mental model and mindset, driving change toward sustainable development. We administered a self-report questionnaire to school leaders from junior high schools in northern urban regions of Taiwan using two-stage sampling. Of the 1,030 questionnaires distributed, 834 were analyzed. The findings indicate that principals in provincial cities with more than 21 years of teaching and under 5 years of leadership experience are more inclined to adopt visionary leadership. Among factors predicting visionary leadership, authenticity, empathy, collaboration, resilience, and service are significant as the core for creating purpose. Leaders’ ethos of authenticity, empathy, and collaboration encourages transformational leadership for fostering a culture of trust, while an ethos of service, resilience, and empathy facilitates instructional leadership for student achievement with leadership learning. The distributed form of transformational and instructional leadership fosters a learning community in leadership development for sustainable values in practice.