Early Care and Education (ECE) Leadership: Examining Associations Between Their Skills, Practice, and Well-Being

• In Event: The Role and Impact of Leadership Development, Well-Being, and Practice in Early Care and Education

Abstract

In comparison to research in the K-12 educational sector, much less is known about the nature of leadership in early care and education (Authors, 2017; Authors, 2021a; Gibbs, 2022; Rodd, 2013). Whereas K-12 educational leadership is a relatively mature field of research with extensive literature on leadership approaches/practice, their consequences, as well as burgeoning research into working conditions and well-being, considerably less attention has been paid to ECE leadership practice, well-being, and the relationship between the two.

Great educational leaders provide support in the form of resources for teachers, work to reduce their demands, and strive to build a culture around self-care and healthy workplace practices. These, in turn, can reduce teacher attrition (Authors, 2023b; Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). However, great influence comes with significant responsibility and challenge. Educational leaders constantly need to manage the competing demands of various stakeholders, attend to their emotional needs and well-being, and maintain cooperative and harmonious relationships with everyone. These tasks exact significant psychological and professional effort and risk (Berkovich & Eyal, 2015). Thus, leaders experience high levels of stress and feel overwhelmed by their many responsibilities (McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership, 2003; Wang et al., 2022), which can lead to burnout, job dissatisfaction, and a desire to leave the profession if left unaddressed (DeMatthews et al., 2021; Yildirim & Dinc, 2019; Skaalvik, 2023).

Balancing all of the demands is challenging and calls on special dispositions, skills, and behaviors. However, ECE leaders feel considerably less prepared for their position and have few formalized pathways for preparation (e.g., only 27% of ECE directors felt prepared for their administrative work; Authors, 2017; McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership, 2003), which can attenuate feelings of efficacy essential for job engagement and role longevity (Federici & Skaalvik, 2011; Federici & Skaalvik, 2012). Being able to bring skills to bear on challenges is essential to the growth of self-efficacy, and is directly related to those aspects of their jobs on which leaders tend to focus, including instructional leadership (Skaalvik, 2020). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between leadership skills, practice, self-efficacy and professional well-being via a structural equation modeling framework with over 400 ECE leaders nationally. Descriptive statistics are presented in Tables 5.1 and 5.2.

Figure 1 presents our final structural model of leadership skills (as measured by the Leadership Practices Inventory [LPI]; Posner & Kouzes, 1988), instructional leadership practice (as measured by leader-reported focus on non-management-related tasks including: culture building; curriculum and teaching; and student and parent interactions), leader self-efficacy, and professional well-being (as measured by job satisfaction, intent to leave, isolation, and emotional exhaustion). Findings demonstrate a good model fit (see Figure 5.1) and significant positive relationships between most leadership skills (except vision building), instructional leadership practice, and self-efficacy. The strongest direct path demonstrated that increases in self-efficacy are associated with decreases in negative professional well-being measures such as burnout and intent to leave.

Authors

• Timothy G. Ford, University of Oklahoma

• Kyong-Ah Kwon, University of Oklahoma