The Servant Leadership Approaches of Principals at Schools –How Successful Do The Principals View Themselves?
Mevlana University, Turkey
ABSTRACT
For ensuring sustainable development and maintaining the competitive advantages of the organizations, lots of leadership approaches have been emerged in the management literature. And, at schools, the leadership roles of school principals is seen as the number one issue in order to achieve effectiveness in education. Servant leadership, as one of the leadership approaches, draws considerable attention in recent years in terms of accomplishing professional development and realizing educational goals through serving the others for the common good. The main goal of that research is, based on the views of the primary school principals, to determine the levels of their servant leadership behaviours they fulfil at schools. The universe of the research constituted the principals working at the primary schools in Elazig, a small city in the Eastern part of Anatolia in Turkey. The research was run in the universe. The total number of the school principals who responded the questionnaire items was 129. To obtain the views of principals about the levels of their own servant leadership behaviours, a questionnaire, developed by the researchers themselves was used. In order to maintain the reliability and validity, a principal component analysis was performed distributing the questionnaires to a large group of people consisting of teachers. And so, the low-loaded questionnaire items were excluded. And the factor analysis gave way to gather the items under three factors named as “caring and integration”, “sensitivity”, and “individual orientation”. For the analysis of the data, frequency, mean, and ANOVA were computed. The results revealed that principals’ views about their own servant leadership fulfilment at schools were highest levels. However, significant difference was found considering the independent variable of educational degree level. Based on the results, some interpretations were produced, and some recommendation were made.
KEYWORDS
Servant Leadership, Principals, Primary Schools