Perceived Leadership Style of Government Primary School Principals in Bole Sub-city

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore government primary
school principals’ leadership style at Bole sub-city of Addis Ababa as
perceived by principals and teachers. A survey design was used to conduct
the study. To this effect, standardized Leadership Orientation Questionnaire
developed by Bolman and Deal (1990) was used to collect data from 32
principals and 216 sample teachers selected with the help of availability
sampling for principals and proportionate stratified random and simple
random sampling techniques for teachers. Using the standardized
questionnaire, both groups of respondents rated principals’ leadership
characteristics. Data were first edited, coded and fed in to a computer using
SPSS 20 for analysis. The data collected were also categorized based on the
four leadership styles - Structural, Human Resource, Political and Symbolic
styles. Finally, data were analyzed using descriptive statistics to examine
statistically significant mean differences between principals’ and teachers’
perceptions; Pearson’s (r) correlation coefficient was employed to show the
relationship between the perceptions of both groups of respondents. The
results indicated that human and structural styles were used modestly higher
than political and symbolic styles by primary school principals. This was
corroborated by both the principals’ and teachers’ responses. It was
concluded that school principals were confident with their human resource
and structural skills and less sure of the political and symbolic skills; so, their
orientation made them average effective managers rather t han leaders