Abstract:

Following the example of many foreign models, the transformation of education cannot be prevented, even in the conditions of educational reality in Slovakia, where we constantly persist in addressing the level of school management while leadership leading to the improvement of education stands on the periphery of society's interest. In the present paper, we draw on empirically confirmed transformative leadership's effectiveness in various productive spheres of human life. Moreover, our ambition is to point out the use of this concept in the conditions of educational reality in Slovakia, where a somewhat transactional model of leadership still prevails. Since leadership involves inspiring and supporting others to achieve the goals of schools or school institutions based on clear personal and professional values, we aim to present possible contexts of transformative leadership and the general self-efficacy of teachers acting in various management positions. The research sample comprised 135 teachers at the secondary level of education. The research utilised the LPI - Leadership Practices Inventory (Kouzes & Posner, 2013) focusing on five types of leader behaviours, namely, Model the way, Inspire a shared vision, Challenge the process, Enable others to act and Encourage the heart. It also utilised the General Self-Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1995), focusing on the leader's self-assessment of self-efficacy. Our research findings suggest a link between transformational leadership and the leader's assessment of self-efficacy. We recognise that a leader's self-assessment may be influenced by feedback from the environment, attributional errors, and the like. Moreover, in a future empirical study, we suggest including multiple evaluators assessing the leader's effectiveness in education (supervisors, peers, followers). Nevertheless, interventions and education aimed at developing leadership types of behaviour, especially in educational leaders, create a prerequisite for the changes needed in the Slovak school system. Finally, the paper showed a clear need for further validation of the transformative leadership model in Slovak education concerning other personal characteristics of teachers.

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

Keywords:

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