School is the crucial environment for children’s development because children spend a large proportion of their waking time in school and most of their interactions outside the family occur there. Researchers have found that poorly adjusted children are at higher risk for low SES, psychopathology, and school drop-out later in life. Therefore, it is important to clearly identify the factors associated with school adjustment. Unfortunately, researchers pay more attention to the characteristics of individuals and families as causal factors in children’s adjustment to school, and neglect the school environment, especially the impact of classroom environment on children's school adjustment. Therefore, future research efforts must take into account the collective characteristics of students at the classroom level, and separate what might be child effects from classroom effects. In Chinese schools, children are divided into classes taught by a full-time head-teacher, who is in charge of a class. It is a reasonable premise that conceives of the class as quasi-organizations, and to advocate that transformational leadership model can be applied to the study of teacher behavior in a Chinese class setting. Based on Bass’ transformational leadership and Bandura’s social cognitive theory, this study proposed a multilevel structural equation model to explore how head-teachers’ transformational leadership influenced students’ school adjustment through collective class efficacy and academic self efficacy both at the class level and the student level.

Data was collected from 5083 junior middle school students in 168 classes from 6 cities of 2 provinces in China. They anonymously filled out questionnaires regarding head-teachers’ transformational leadership, school adjustment, collective class efficacy, and academic self efficacy. Meanwhile, students’ demographic information including gender, grade, SES, and whether to serve as a class leader was all obtained. At the class level, class size and head-teachers’ gender were also required to report. All the measures had good reliability and validity. The ICC(1) of the four variable items ranged between .06 and .25, and these values could be considered as moderate grouping effect and justify the use of multilevel modeling. Finally, we conducted a multilevel structural equation (MSEM) analysis to simultaneously estimate direct and indirect effects in the case of clustered data.

The results revealed that: (1) Head-teachers’ transformational leadership was positively and significantly related to student’ school adjustment differences among classes. (2) Collective class efficacy and academic self efficacy played mediating roles between head-teachers’ transformational leadership and school adjustment. Particularly, head-teachers’ transformational leadership affected school adjustment through two paths: the separate mediation effect of academic self efficacy and the serial mediation effect of Collective class efficacy and academic self efficacy. This study extends our knowledge that transformational leadership has the cross-organizational and cross-cultural applicability of the construct in a Chinese classroom setting. Moreover, it is also most meaningful to deeply understand how head-teachers’ transformational leadership facilitates school adjustment from individual level to class level. It explores the multilevel mediating process between head-teachers’ transformational leadership and school adjustment through collective class efficacy and academic self efficacy. In practice, education managers should improve head-teachers’ transformational leadership and develop high collective class efficacy and academic self efficacy on the basis of social cognitive theory.