Abstract:

School management is a process made up of multiple intervening elements, such as leadership, context, organizational culture, current curricular policies, and the professional profile of the teaching and administrative staff, among others. It is important to understand in a comprehensive way the functioning of an educational center, the roles that each one of its members assumes, the joint goals that are proposed to achieve, as well as the leadership styles that are modeled. This leads to the quality of the educational offer, the capacity to adapt to the process of change and the repercussions on the social transformation of contexts.

The differentiator element of the management of educational centers with respect to other organizations resides in the pedagogical dimension that is developed, taking relevance in the interactions of the agents involved in the process. The transformational leadership style appears as an alternative for the management of these centers, encouraging the collaborative work of their members, providing spaces for dialogue, for democratic participation, which has repercussions on the motivation, sense of belonging and commitment of the personal.

The work that is presented is part of a major investigation that was carried out with the objective of analyzing the leadership style of the directors of Costa Rican educational centers. The results showed are related to the identification of predominance of the components of transformational leadership (Avolio and Bass, 2004). The research is performed from a positivist paradigm, through a non-experimental and transversal design (Hernández, Fernández and Baptista, 2014). The data are collected with the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ 5X) scale of Bass and Avolio (1994). The probability sample amounts to n=125 directors of educational centers of the province of Heredia (Costa Rica).

The discoveries reveal high scores both in the subscale of the transformational style in general, and each of its components (intellectual stimulation, idealized influence, motivation for inspiration, individual considerations). This implies the opening, by the directors, of dialogue spaces to respond in an opportune manner to the needs demanded by the different contexts. In this way, the achievement of joint goals is directed from a planning with sense and commitment of each one of the members of the center. In addition to the above, the manager's ability to transcend his own interests for those of the organization is visualized, as well as the image of authority that strikes from the moral and ethical dimension, as well as the motivation that he generates in his work team towards collaborative processes of high performance.

Keywords:

Leadership, transformational leadership, educational centers, leadership styles, education.