Linking Principals’ Digital Leadership to Teacher Performance through Digital Transformation Readiness: An Integrative Literature Review

Abstract

Digital transformation has reshaped educational practices and increased the need for school leadership that can support teachers in adapting to technology-driven changes. However, existing studies tend to examine principals’ digital leadership, teacher readiness, and teacher performance separately, leaving the mechanism connecting these constructs insufficiently integrated. This study aims to synthesize existing evidence on the relationships among principals’ digital leadership, teachers’ digital transformation readiness, and teacher performance, and to develop an integrative framework explaining the potential role of readiness in linking leadership with professional performance. An integrative literature review was conducted using a predefined corpus of 12 scholarly articles published between 2022 and 2026. The articles were examined through structured evidence extraction, evidence classification, conceptual harmonization, relational synthesis, and integrative thematic synthesis. The findings show relatively consistent evidence that principals’ digital leadership is positively associated with teacher performance, while complementary evidence indicates relationships between digital leadership and digital readiness and between readiness for change and teacher performance. The synthesis further identifies teacher digital transformation readiness as a multidimensional construct encompassing capability readiness, psychological readiness, and organizationally enabled readiness. Nevertheless, none of the reviewed studies directly tested the complete pathway linking principals’ digital leadership to teacher performance through digital transformation readiness. Therefore, this review proposes digital transformation readiness as a theoretically plausible explanatory mechanism rather than an empirically confirmed mediator. The resulting leadership–readiness–performance framework highlights that effective educational digital transformation depends on the interaction between supportive digital leadership, teachers’ preparedness for change, and enabling organizational conditions.