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 than leaders.