After several years of coursework, research, writing, revision, prayer, and more revision, I am grateful to share that I have officially completed my Doctor of Philosophy in Organizational Leadership. Walking through the final defense was surreal, both deeply humbling and deeply rewarding. I am thankful for the many mentors, pastors, professors, and friends who walked beside me, especially during the long writing months.

Now that the dissertation is finished, I’m excited to become more active here on the blog again. I told my wife, that it’s weird not feeling the weight of working on it. I look forward to writing more frequently.

As I begin that journey, I wanted to share just three quick insights from my study that may encourage leaders, teachers, pastors, and anyone invested in Christian education.

1. Authentic Leadership Really Matters

My research explored the relationship between authentic leadership, a model of leadership characterized by self-awareness, transparency, internal moral values, and balanced decision-making, and teacher burnout, which is one of the most persistent challenges in today. Burnout levels are experienced in three areas: higher emotional exhaustion, higher depersonalization, and lower sense of personal accomplishment. of My study was situated as the perceived authentic leadership behaviors of principals on the burnout experienced by teachers in Christian schools in Ohio.

Consistent with previous scholarship, the study found that when teachers perceive their principals as authentic leaders, they report lower depersonalization and higher personal accomplishment, two core components of burnout (Walumbwa et al., 2008; Bowman, 2020). In other words:

When leaders model honesty, humility, and moral consistency, teachers feel more supported, more valued, and more effective.

This is good news, because every school, large or small, rural or urban, public or Christian, can cultivate authentic leadership habits.

2. Burnout Is More Relational Than We Often Think

One of the most interesting findings was that relational burnout (like discouragement, isolation, or feeling disconnected from purpose) was more affected by leadership behavior than emotional exhaustion, which tends to come from structural pressures such as workload or class size.

This aligns with the work of Maslach and Leiter (2016), who showed that emotional exhaustion is often tied to system-wide issues, not just leadership interactions. But the relational aspects of burnout? Those are heavily shaped by culture, trust, and leadership relationships.

For Christian schools especially, this means that fostering a relationally healthy environment is not optional, it’s essential.

3. Demographics Don’t Always Predict Burnout—Leadership Behavior Does

A major question in burnout research is whether factors like age, gender, years of experience, or grade level play a significant role. My study, consistent with Bowman (2020) and Moreno (2018), found that while these variables sometimes show small trends, they do not predict burnout as powerfully as leadership behavior.

This is encouraging because:

You don’t have to change your staff to change your school, you can change your leadership approach.

Healthy, authentic leadership has ripple effects that touch every corner of the organization.

What’s Next?

Now that my research journey is finished, I’m looking forward to:

Writing more consistently
Sharing leadership insights from Scripture and scholarship
Encouraging all believers.
Offering practical tools for leaders.

Thank you for reading, and thank you to all who prayed and supported me through this long season. I’m excited for what God has next, and excited to be back.

References

Bowman, J. (2020). Authentic leadership and burnout (Publication No. 28024319) [Doctoral dissertation, Saint Mary’s College of California]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Burnout. In G. Fink (Ed.), Stress: Concepts, Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior (pp. 351–357). Academic Press.

Moreno, L. (2018). Principal authentic leadership and teacher burnout (Publication No. 10807893) [Doctoral dissertation, Lamar University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89–126.