Teachers’ Perceptions of Principal Managerial Competence and School Infrastructure as Predictors of Work Motivation in a Vocational School

Muhammad Nuh (Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta)
Yuni Astuti (Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta)

Indonesian Technology and Education Journal
Vol 4 No 2 (2026): Agustus

Teacher work motivation plays an important role in sustaining instructional quality in vocational education, where teachers are expected to integrate theoretical instruction with practical and industry-oriented learning. This study examined the associations between teachers’ perceptions of principal managerial competence and school infrastructure and their self-reported work motivation in a public vocational high school in Indonesia. A quantitative associative, cross-sectional design was employed involving all 20 teachers through total sampling. Data were collected using pilot-tested and reliable Likert-scale questionnaires and analyzed using multiple linear regression, with Spearman rank-order correlation employed as a supplementary analysis because of non-normal data distributions. The findings showed that perceived principal managerial competence was positively and significantly associated with teacher work motivation, whereas perceived school infrastructure did not demonstrate a significant independent association after managerial competence was taken into account. Nevertheless, school infrastructure remained strongly associated with teacher motivation at the bivariate level. The overall regression model was statistically significant and explained 68.5% of the variance in teacher work motivation. These findings suggest that, within this school context, teachers’ perceptions of principal managerial competence were more strongly associated with work motivation than their perceptions of school infrastructure. The results highlight the potential importance of effective school management in supporting teacher motivation in vocational education while also indicating that infrastructure may operate in conjunction with broader managerial conditions rather than as an isolated factor. Given the small, single-school, cross-sectional sample and reliance on teacher-reported perceptions, the findings should be interpreted as exploratory and context-specific rather than causal or broadly generalizable.