An Investigation of the Effective Leadership Behaviors of School Principals

The purpose of this study is to determine the level of display of effective leadership behaviors by school principals. Descriptive design was used in this research. The target population of the study is the teachers who work in primary and high schools in Kartal, Maltepe and üsküdar located in stanbul, The sample consists of 703 primary and high school teachers randomly selected from the population. The study was carried out quantitatively and data were gathered through the 30-item 5-point Likert-type scale developed by the researchers. Data were analyzed by percentages, frequencies, means and crosstabs. In order to find out sources of differences and do pair comparisons, Mann-Whitney U tests were employed while Kruskal-Wallis H tests were used to do comparisons of variables having more than three levels. According to the results obtained from this research, teachers stated that principals “sometimes” demonstrate effective leadership behaviors. When mean scores of all the items were checked, the highest score was earned by the item, “The principal plans the future of the school” and the lowest score by “Principals are open to be criticized.” There were significant differences based on gender and teaching experience of teachers and school types.