Abstract:

Leadership in educational institutions is considered one of the most critical factors for quality education. In recent years, the idea of transformative leadership has increasingly emerged in the process of finding and implementing effective practices to increase the effectiveness of educational leaders and consequently improve the quality of school outcomes. One of the most important factors of a leader's effectiveness is his or her personality and intelligence.
The purpose of the present paper is to analyse the interrelationships between the Big Five personality traits, intelligence and transformational leader behaviour as conceptualised by Kouzes and Posner (2017) and the potential mediating influence of intelligence on the personality-transformational leadership relationship. The research sample comprised 248 teaching staff. Intelligence quotient (IQ) was measured using the Intellectual Potential Test (Ricjan, 1971), types of leadership behaviour using the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI; Kouzes & Posner, 2017), and Big Five personality traits using the NEO-FFI (Ruisel & Halama, 2007). Our findings reveal multiple positive significant relationships between all types of leadership behaviour and conscientiousness, extraversion and openness. Agreeableness entered into significant negative relationships with Model the Way type behaviour, and Neuroticism entered into significant negative relationships with all types of leadership behaviour. Intelligence entered into a significant negative relationship with agreeableness only. The regression analysis results indicated that three personality factors - extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness - are primarily involved to varying degrees in determining each type of leadership behaviour. The personality factors predict between 17% and 51% of the total variability of the different types of transformational leader behaviour. Conscientiousness was the strongest predictor of each type of leadership behaviour. We did not find a mediating effect of intelligence in the relationship between personality traits and transformational leadership. The self-report instruments and the size of the research sample limit our findings. Nevertheless, they are valuable contributions to implementing transformative leadership in Slovak educational practice.

The paper was written with the support of the VEGA 1/0152/21 project, " Competencies of a leader in the educational environment in the context of his/her personal predispositions and effectiveness".

Keywords:

Educational leadership, transformational leader, intelligence, personality.