Session Information
26 SES 11 A, Leadership Style and Personal Traits
Paper Session
Contribution
Literature on school administration has concurrently suggested that effective school leaders play a pivotal role in enhancing student achievement through indirect means, such as developing people, creating a positive learning climate, re-organizing school structure and managing instructional program (Leithwood, Seashore Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004).This finding emphasizes the recruitment and retention of effective principals in all schools. Having and keeping good quality principals depends partly on the extent to which they are satisfied with what they do. It is therefore crucial for policy makers and researchers to explore factors that play a deterministic role in principals’ job satisfaction. However, research focusing on principal job satisfaction has been rare.
The report of MetLife Survey of American Teacher (Metlife, inc, 2013) revealed that almost three-quarters of principals surveyed, regardless of demographics, said that their job had become too complex along with increasing accountability requirement. Like teachers, principals job satisfaction had declined and at its lowest point since 2001. One-third said they were likely to leave the job in five years. The research done by Adams (1999) also found out a stressful and complex political environment, the reducibility of authority for principal to make effect change, a perceived lack of support, the growing accountability, etc. have caused high school principal either to return to classroom teaching or to leave education entirely.
All above alerted the significance to involve principal’s job satisfaction into policy agenda and academic research. The comparison of principal job satisfaction in international context is absolutely meaningful to provide useful evidence about differentiation of principle job satisfaction in the countries that yield disparate student achievement, which will instigate policy makers to realize the importance of principal job satisfaction in order to provide omnidirectional support for the principle to be successful.
Research on Job satisfaction
Generally, the definition of job satisfaction involves the feeling, emotion and attitude, towards a job, and how the feeling, emotion and attitude impact their reaction to the job and life (Spector, 1997). Former research focused on several issues related to job satisfaction.
One of them was the relationship between leadership styles and job satisfaction. However, researchers mostly emphasized exclusively the influence of principals’ leadership style on teachers’ job satisfaction. But very few research could be located that investigates the impact leadership style exerts on principals’ job satisfaction. The studies that were conducted in Israel (Bogler, 2001); Tanzania (Nguni et al., 2006); Turkey (Korkmaz, 2007), China (Hui, et. al. 2013), and USA (Biggerstaff, 2012) congruously emphasize transformative and transactional leadership styles and their correlation with teachers’ job satisfaction, and consistently found out successful transformational and transactional leadership has been positively related to teacher job satisfaction. Yet there is not much research regarding how instructional and distributed leadership styles might influence principals’ job satisfaction
Other researchers investigated the relationship between job satisfaction and school climate. Over this time, school climate has been referred to as the “heart and soul” (Freiberg, 1999, p. 11), and “the atmosphere, culture, resources, and social networks of a school” (Loukas & Murphy, 2007, p. 293). Former research has shown that teachers’ perception of school climate is a key predictor of teacher job satisfaction (Butt et al., 2005; Collie, Shapka, & Perry, 2012); However, given that previous research, we would fill the gap in literature with the current study by examining the influence of school climate on principal job satisfaction.
Finally researchers have also been interested in investigating relationship between principals’ job satisfaction and specific characteristics. Throughout the research, little consistency has been apparent in the findings. The variables that are most often examined include: gender, education level, experience, professional development, tenure, school socio-economic condition, school size and location, and school accreditation status etc. (Eckman, 2002).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Adams, J. P. (1999). Good principals, good schools. Thrust for Educational Leadership, 29(1), 8-11. Bogler, R. (2001). The influence of leadership style on teacher job satisfaction. Educational Administration Quarterly, 37, 662. Butt, G., Lance, A., Fielding, A., Gunter, H., Rayner, S., & Thomas, H. (2005). Teacher job satisfaction: Lessons from the TSW pathfinder project. School Leadership and Management, 25, 455–471. doi:10.1080/13634230500340807 Collie, R. J., Shapka, J. D., & Perry, N. E. (2012). School climate and social–emotional learning: Predicting teacher stress, job satisfaction, and teaching efficacy. Journal of Educational Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0029356 Freiberg, H. J. (1999). Introduction. In H. J. Freiberg (Ed.), School climate: Measuring, improving, and sustaining healthy learning environments (pp. 1–11). Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press. Eckman, E. W. (2002). Women high school principals: Perspectives on role conflicts, role commitment, and job satisfaction. Journal of School Leadership, 12, 57-77. Harris, A. (2009). Distributed Leadership, Different perspectives. Netherland Springer Press. Hui, H., Jenatabadi, H. S., Binti I., Noor A., Wan M. R., Che W. J. (2013), Principal's leadership style and teacher job satisfaction: A case study in China. IJCRB , 5, 4 Korkmaz, M. (2007). The effects of leadership styles on organizational health. Education Research Quarterly, 30(3), 22-54. Leithwood, K., Seashore Louis, K., Anderson, S., & Wahlstrom, K. (2004, September).How leadership influences student learning. Retrieved April, 2009, from http://cehd.umn.edu/CAREI/leadership/ExecutiveSummary.pdf. Loukas, A., & Murphy, J. L. (2007). Middle school student perceptions of school climate: Examining protective functions on subsequent adjustment problems. Journal of School Psychology, 45, 293–309. doi: 10.1016/j.jsp.2006.10.001 MetLife, Inc. (2013). The MetLife survey of the American teacher: Challenges for School Leadership. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED542202.pdf. Spector, P. (1997). Job satisfaction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Nguni, S., Sleegers, P., & Denessen, E. (2006). Transformational and transactional leadership effects on teachers’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior in primary schools: The Tanzanian case. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 17, 145-177.
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