<![CDATA[Purpose – Most school leadership research departs from assumptions that do not hold in many real-world contexts: adequate infrastructure, stable government funding, and sustained public trust in state-provided education.Methodology – Thematic analysis progressed through three stages, following the grounded theory procedures outlined in NVivo 15, which supported the work throughout.Findings – This study addresses the resulting gap through a qualitative case study of a state primary school in Tapanuli Tengah, North Sumatra, Indonesia, where the incumbent principal raised the school's accreditation from B to A under significant resource constraints. Twelve informants from four institutional positions participated in semi-structured interviews. Transcripts were coded in NVivo 15 through open, axial, and selective coding stages. Five core themes emerged: the manifestation of entrepreneurial competence through an asset-based orientation and a dual-channel resource strategy; humanizing leadership practices centered on psychological safety; pedagogical and managerial innovation as quality-improvement mechanisms; leadership resilience as a system of learnable practices; and community trust as strategically managed social capital. Two original theoretical constructs emerged: the dual conviction model, which holds that lasting motivation requires simultaneous beliefs in meaningfulness and personal capability, and the humanizing entrepreneurial leadership framework, which repositions psychological safety as a causal precondition rather than an ethical supplement.Contribution – Both constructs carry direct implications for leadership development programs in under-resourced school contexts.]]>
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