This research examines the relationship between three leadership types exhibited by principals (instructional, distributed, and transformational leadership) and teacher academic optimism in order to reveal the differential effects of these leadership models on teachers' perceived academic optimism. The participants of the study included 225 elementary school teachers working at 20 schools across two provinces of Turkey. Several multiple regression models with OLS assumptions were employed in the analysis of the data. The results showed that all three leadership types were significantly related to teachers' academic optimism, yet distributed leadership explained the largest proportion of the total variation. When other leadership types were controlled, only distributed leadership emerged as a significant predictor of teacher academic optimism.