Analyzing the Leadership Behavior of School Principals

The authors describe various methods of measuring a principal's leadership behavior. They have developed a new survey instrument that can be used to analyze the leadership behavior/style of a principal. The instrument consists of 49 positive and negative behaviors that measure how a principal interacts with staff in the following five leadership domains: human relations, trust/decision making, instructional leadership, control, and conflict. A correlation coefficient of +0.95, as measured by the Cronbach alpha, was obtained indicating the instrument has excellent reliability. Reliability on each of the five factors ranges from a high of +0.86 to a low of +0.81. The instrument has adequate construct validity in terms of those behaviors principals practice that teachers like or find offensive (as reported by 375 teachers). The behaviors measured by the survey are listed along with the average response of the teachers who responded to the survey. The authors also describe some results with the first use of the survey in a Louisiana study where a +0.95 correlation was found between scores on the leadership behavior survey and scores on a culture and climate survey. The authors conclude that the survey can be used to measure a principal's leadership behavior, as an early indicator of what is happening to a school's culture and climate and eventually student achievement.