Purpose: The benefits of teacher leadership have attracted the attention of policymakers, practitioners and researchers. It is increasingly advocated as one of the most crucial and indispensable components of the school, college and university administration. The present study tends to investigate the role of gratitude in developing teacher leadership through examining sufficiency and necessity of thankfulness for educational leadership. Design/methodology/approach: The study explores sufficiency and necessity of gratitude for seven dimensions of educational leadership with the help of correlation, regression and necessary condition analysis. Findings: The paper concludes that gratitude is both sufficient and necessary condition for overall teacher leadership and its seven dimensions. Originality/value: The paper is based on original data.