<![CDATA[Purpose: This study evaluates the direct and indirect structural contributions of principal leadership practices and teacher organizational commitment toward the work performance of secondary school principals and teachers. Method: Employing a quantitative ex-post facto path analysis design, data were collected from three hundred twenty certified teachers and thirty-two principals across public and private high schools in Medan, Indonesia. Structured Likert-based survey instruments measured administrative leadership behaviors, workplace loyalty, and multidimensional performance outputs using maximum likelihood estimation. Findings: Path modeling revealed exceptional goodness-of-fit. Principal leadership exerted a strong direct positive effect on teacher commitment, while teacher commitment demonstrated the highest direct impact on teacher performance. Bootstrap analysis confirmed a statistically significant indirect pathway connecting leadership to teacher performance through organizational commitment, collectively explaining nearly half of total performance variance. Practical implications: Educational authorities should reform principal preparation initiatives to emphasize transformational supervisory behaviors, authority delegation, and trust-building practices that reduce teacher attrition and enhance classroom instructional execution. Originality/value: This research provides an empirically validated structural path model contextualizing leadership, organizational loyalty, and performance synergy within an emerging secondary education framework.]]>
