Principal Leadership Activities and Teachers' Workplace Attitudes

• In Event: Principal Leadership Practices, Student Learning, and Teacher Outcomes

Abstract

Objective. This study combines ideas from leadership theory to ask: To what extent do different principal leadership activities impact teachers’ work attitudes? To address this question, I match principals’ reports of their instructional, distributed, and managerial leadership activities to their teachers’ reports of teaching satisfaction and commitment using the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 database.
Perspective. Teachers’ work attitudes impact their work behaviors which ripple into the classroom learning environment (Banerjee et al., 2017). In particular, teachers’ relationships with their students directly shape students’ self-efficacy, achievement, and engagement (Bryk et al., 2010; Wubbels et al., 2012). Theoretically, this paper posits that principals indirectly impact student outcomes through their direct influence on teachers and the school climate (see Leithwood et al., 2004; Louis et al., 2010; Muijs, 2011; ten Bruggencate et al., 2012; Witziers et al., 2003).
Data and Methods. I use TALIS 2018 data which selects a representative sample of teachers and their school leaders from 48 countries/provinces around the world. Two-stage sample selection is used to first select a representative group of 200 mainstream schools in a country/province and then randomly select teachers within these schools. This study averages the scores of teachers within a school, calculates the amount of variation on those scores within a school, and merges those measures onto the principal data to form a school-level analytic dataset.
Fixed effects linear regression models test the relationships of these leadership and school climate factors in relation to the three schoolwide teacher outcomes to answer the research question. The models account for school size and control for the demographic makeup of the teachers in the school (age, experience, gender) in conjunction with the principals’ demographics. The models also control for outcome variation among teachers in a school to test the extent to which more consensus versus more diversity among teachers’ perceptions shape the school level outcomes.
Results. On the whole, teachers appear to place more value on how principals use their time in school (what principals “do”) than how they think they lead (what principals “say”). Table 1 shows that principals’ time spent on different leadership tasks and direct one-on-one feedback to teachers shape teachers’ satisfaction and commitment attitudes much more than principals’ perceptions of how they lead. Principals’ interactions with their teachers rather than their facilitation of teacher collaboration speaks to the role of dyadic relationships between teachers and their principal as a bedrock to positive schoolwide climate. Together, these results highlight how the social structure in schools, particularly between principals and teachers, shapes the schools as a workplace.
Significance. By juxtaposing leaders’ perceived orientations with leaders’ task behaviors, this study shows the importance of principals’ activities, especially their time spent on the provision of feedback, instructional tasks, and maintaining trusted relationships among the school community. Focusing this analysis on similarities between culturally-different school systems tests the applicability of primarily U.S.-based leadership theories and their flexibility, and pushes to expand the scope of theory about the interplay of leadership with school climate.

Author

• Heather E. Price, Loyola University Chicago