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This meta-synthesis crosses international borders by analyzing successful principalship across nine countries. With careful, detailed, systematic, and analytic synthesis, it critically explores research-informed understandings of successful principal leadership over the last 20 years. The paper is an interim report of reviews of the 85 articles and 23 chapters produced by the International Successful School Principal Project (ISSPP), the largest, longest-running international research project in this field. In that project, success is defined as the principal’s ability to grow and sustain students’ academic, personal, and social developments and achievements over time. The results add to existing knowledge of how successful school principals achieve success by examining high-quality, published case study evidence from Australia, Cyprus, Israel, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Spain, the UK, and the US. Results suggest common sets of core values, qualities, and practices among school principals, regardless of national contexts, conditions, or cultures. Because the research design is multi-perspective and multi-layered, the case studies also show significant, context-informed differences in timing, pace, and extent of application of improvement strategies. Thus, the findings of this synthesis paint a thorough and cohesive picture of who successful principals are and what they do over time at the global level to achieve success, as they navigate values-led school success in different contexts and improvement phases within complex internal and external ecological chrono-, macro-, exo-, meso-, and microsystems.

As the most-studied form of leadership across disciplines in both Western and Chinese contexts, transformational school leadership has the potential to suit diverse national and cultural contexts. Given the growing evidence showing the positive effects of transformational leadership on various school outcomes as it relates to school environment, teacher and student achievement, we wanted to explore the factors that gave rise to transformational leadership. The purpose of this study was to identify and compare the antecedents fostering transformational leadership in the contexts of both the United States and China. This paper reviews and discusses the empirical studies of the last two decades, concentrating on the variables that are antecedent to transformational leadership mainly in the educational context, but also in public management, business and psychology. Results show that transformational leadership is related to three sets of antecedents, which include: (1) the leader’s qualities (e.g., self-efficacy, values, traits, emotional intelligence); (2) organizational features (e.g., organization fairness); and (3) the leader’s colleagues’ characteristics (e.g., follower’s initial developmental level). Some antecedents were common to both contexts, while other antecedents appeared to be national context specific. The implications of the findings for future research and leader preparation in different national contexts are discussed.