Abstract:

Leaders in educational institutions often have very complex and challenging, even conflicting situations which add uncertainty at work and burden the well-being of principals and the whole work community. Finding the balance between pedagogical and administrative management, solving complicated issues, maintaining team spirit, and motivating the staff to participate in planning and developing procedures at work require good leadership competence.

The aim of the research published in 2012 was to examine principals’ opinions and experiences of management supervision in basic education and upper secondary school. The main question is: What function does management supervision have in an educational institution’s leadership? This questionnaire was sent as an electronic survey to 2885 Finnish principals in basic education and upper secondary schools. Altogether, 691 principals answered the questionnaire, which is an outcome of 24 percent.

According to the results, support for competence based leadership has a long lasting effect on well-being at work. Management supervision helps principals to plan education, develops the organizational skills of leaders, helps the staff to feel better at work, improves the relationships between principals and staff, enables early intervention into problematical situations, gives new perspectives on management, adds leadership capacities, strengthens the basic duties of man-agement, and supports decision-making. The results may be used especially to contribute to the education of principals and to rethink the organizing of management supervision and necessity.

This leadership survey is a part of the research project Citizen’s Voice. Analysis of the prospects of deliberative democracy in Finnish health care. This project consists of two themes: 1) citizen's participation and 2) organizational complexity and wicked problems. One way to correlate with those challenges is management supervision.

Keywords:

Management in educational institution, management supervision, basic education, upper secondary school, leadership survey.