Abstract:

Education leadership, as in other management disciplines, is the process of managing the behaviour of others to achieve common goals. It applies influences that act reciprocally. A leader can influence the behaviour of group members, and group members can simultaneously change the leader's behaviour. In the Slovak educational reality, there is an apparent effort to transform the ever-persistent transactional leadership into transformative leadership characterised by emphasising personal values and belief in the leader rather than the transaction of material goods or benefits. Thanks to their personality traits and charisma, an efficient transformative leader in education influences their followers in such a way that they are perceived as a leader worthy of emulation. Thus, they become a role model, an inspiration, and driving force that creates spaces for their followers. Since leadership involves inspiring and supporting others to achieve the goals of the school or school establishment, which is based on clear personality traits and professional values, we aim to analyse the differences in the leader's evaluation of their self-efficacy and their followers' evaluation of the leader's self-efficacy. The research sample consisted of 112 second-level teachers and nine principals-educational leaders. The Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) (Kouzes & Posner, 2013) was used to identify them. The General Self-Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer & Jeruzalem, 1995) was used to evaluate the leaders' self-efficacy. The above tool was also used from the perspective of followers who rated the self-efficacy of their leaders. Our research findings suggest a link between a leader's evaluation of their self-efficacy and their followers' evaluation of the leader's self-efficacy. These findings suggest that a leader's self-evaluation may be influenced by feedback from the environment and other factors, which we would like to focus on in the future.

Acknowledgement:
The research was supported by the VEGA 1/0152/21 grant project.

Keywords:

Educational leadership, transformational leader, self-efficacy, teacher.