Teachers' and Administrators' MLQ Related Beliefs of the Leadership Styles of School Administrators in Select North Carolina Public School Districts
Abstract
Through the lens of transactional-transformational leadership theory, this study specifically focused on school administrators and their leadership styles as measured by the sample of eligible participants. The sample was drawn from a population that consisted of 79 school administrators (44.6% females to 24.6% males) and 222 teachers (52.7% females to 13.4% males) employed by two rural school districts in North Carolina at the time of data collection. Principals, assistant principals and eligible Local Education Agency (LEA) site based instructional leaders were purposefully selected to complete the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire 5x (MLQ5x). Teachers, at each grade level group from the two rural LEAs were invited to participate in this study using the MLQ5x with the inclusion of selected "open-ended questions" related to their beliefs about leadership characteristics of their current and past school principals. Data collection involved the selection of 222 teachers using a stratified-random sampling technique in an effort to obtain representation from elementary, middle and high school teachers identified by the LEAs confidential list of eligible teachers (N=222); however, of 122 electronic replies to the survey, the analysis of the findings for statistical procedures of independent sample t-test and factor analyses were based upon teacher participants who completed all items selected for analysis (n=47). The findings from the MLQ 5x of the teachers did not produce a large sample size or effect size, thus producing a limitation on strength of the findings. The independent-samples t- test was used with the Levene's test procedure where five items had a p-value at or below (p < .05). Descriptive statistics for whether there is a difference in the perceptions of male and female teachers on the leadership styles of their current school administrator were utilized. The findings of the survey completers from the factor analysis suggested that of the 45 items used for the analysis of this study, a preference for the transformational leadership related items seemed evident. There were eleven components that accounted for approximately 80% of the variance among the 45 items. Component 1 of the factor analysis accounted for 39.482% of the variance. Responses to the open-ended questions were collected from teachers to determine their beliefs about school leaders in determining which leadership styles may be effective in creating a better school climate, increasing teacher morale and ultimately increasing academic achievement. A larger sample size was needed to effectively draw statistically significant conclusions, but the findings provided evidence that teachers believed their current school administrators utilize several characteristics of the transformational leadership style and that male school administrators used more transactional characteristics. Additionally, the teacher participants in this study did not seemingly perceive one gender to be more effective than the other when it comes to school administration.
Subject Area
Educational leadership
Recommended Citation
Satterfield Cox, Theresa Yvonne, "Teachers' and Administrators' MLQ Related Beliefs of the Leadership Styles of School Administrators in Select North Carolina Public School Districts" (2017). ETD Collection for Fayetteville State University. AAI10991769.
https://digitalcommons.uncfsu.edu/dissertations/AAI10991769