First Prestudy. Strain and Stress in School Leadership—Practices, Personality, and Organization and System Features: Selected Findings From Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland

• In Event: World School Leadership Study: Practices and Resilience

Abstract

The school leadership study on practices and health of school leaders was conducted in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. The research questions are: i. which of their professional activities do school leaders like to do, which are a strain on them and which do they actually do? ii. What individual factors as well as institutional or system factors predict the health of school leaders in terms of job satisfaction, general strain and emotional exhaustion?

For operationalization purposes, Huber’s (2009) model of school leadership practices was used and Böhm-Kasper’s (2004) model of school-related stress was adapted to the contextual specificities of school leadership.

The study was conducted as follows:
1. An exploratory study comprising of 20 interviews with school leaders was conducted to identify factors of strain.
2. A quantitative, standardized online-survey was distributed to school leaders. It focused on the preferences and strains in leadership practices in connection with individual factors and institutional factors, predicting job satisfaction, general job strain and emotional exhaustion.
3. The daily professional practices and activities of school leaders were recorded via an end-of-day-log covering three work-weeks distributed across one school year.
4. Interviews were conducted with school leaders focusing on areas of pressure and tension in school leadership practice and on the interrelations of stress patterns of highly strained school leaders.
5394 school leaders participated in the study (min-rr:49%). Participants were between 25 and 66 years old (M= 52.45; SD=7.75). A sub-sample in Baden-Wurttemberg participated in an end-of-day-log study (4998 log-entries). For the analysis of quantitative data, structure equation modelling as well as hierarchical linear modelling was used. For the qualitative approaches deductive and inductive coding was used.

Generally speaking, school leaders who experience an activity as stressful do not like to perform this activity as much as activities perceived as not stressful. However, there are also some exceptions as even activities that are liked can lead to stress. Tasks that belong to the traditional range of tasks of teachers like teaching or counseling or other aspects of quality development are more popular among school leaders and are experienced as less stressful than tasks that have been added to school leadership responsibilities only recently through changes in the school system as a consequence of decentralization (new public management) as controlling or reporting or other aspects of quality assessment and evaluation.

The analysis of the conditioning factors for job satisfaction, occupational stress and emotional exhaustion showed the strongest effects for the individual stress resilience and social support by colleagues: The higher the individual stress resilience and the higher the social support by colleagues are, the lower the individual’s occupational stress and emotional exhaustion are perceived to be and the higher the job satisfaction experienced by school leaders is. Methods of data analysis such as SEM and HLM show differences between different regions. Organizational context also matters; the development stage of the school, the SES of the parents, size, status of school building, but most of all social factors, particularly the social support by colleagues.

Authors

• Stephan Gerhard Huber, University of Teacher Education Zug

• Christine Wolfgramm, Institute for the Management & Economics of Education

• Selin Kilic, Institute for the Management & Economics of Education

• Marius Schwander, University of Teacher Education Zug