TITLE:
Key Leadership Attributes and Professional Growth among School Leaders: An Empirical Study
AUTHORS:
Suirong Cao, Ahmad Nawaz Zaheer
KEYWORDS:
Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Development, Professional Growth
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Business and Management,
Vol.14 No.3,
May
13,
2026
ABSTRACT: This study examines the impact of key leadership attributes—Emotional Intelligence, Rapport Trust Building, Reflective Capacity, Generativity in Leadership, and Emotionally Safe Environments—on the professional growth of school leaders in China. Using data from 500 respondents, we applied Ridge Regression to manage multicollinearity and found that these attributes significantly predict professional growth, explaining 62.1 percent of its variance (R2 = 0.621). Emotional Intelligence (coefficient = 0.2689, p p p p p