Abstract:

Recent reports and extant research in the field of education tend to emphasize the important role that leaders may play in the schools they manage. Interestingly, most of these reports consider educational leadership to be the second most important factor (just behind the work of teachers in the classroom) contributing to the improvement of academic performance among students. With this idea in mind, the main purpose of this study is to provide new insights into the main determinants of the different leadership styles that schools can adopt. In this regard, we distinguish three types of leadership styles that have traditionally been considered by the corresponding literature: instrumental, participative and supportive. Thus, our interest will be to test the contextual and organizational factors that together with the demographic characteristics related to principals are more likely to significantly influence the adoption of each leadership style. The research setting consists of a sample of 105 Spanish secondary schools in the Autonomous Community of Madrid. We use a multinomial logistic regression model to empirically test the different hypotheses posited in our study. Overall, our results show that most of the organizational, contextual and demographic variables considered here are statistically significant. More importantly, our findings confirm that most of these variables have a significant effect on the choice of one or other leadership style. The study has some major implications for academics, school counsellors, principals, teachers, professionals and policymakers in education.

Keywords:

Leadership style, organizational factors, contextual factors, demographic characteristics, secondary education.