A study of the relationships of achievement tendency of secondary school principals and teachers with the principals' leadership behavior as rated by their superiors and subordinates

Purpose. This investigation was concerned with studying the leadership behavior and achievement tendency in Harris County, Texas, suburban secondary schools. The purpose of the study was twofold: first, to investigate the relationship between principals' leadership behavior and their achievement tendency, and second, to investigate the relationship between principals' leadership behavior and teachers' achievement tendency. The principals' leadership behavior was determined by the perceptions of teachers and superiors of principals. Procedure. The population selected for the study consisted of all secondary schools of Harris County suburban school districts which had more than two but less than twenty secondary schools. One school from each district was randomly selected. The principals of the ten selected secondary schools, the superiors of the ten principals, and one hundred full-time teachers, ten randomly selected from each school, participated in the study. Data were collected through the medium of two instruments. Mehrabian Achieving Tendency Scales, developed by Albert Mehrabian (1968) were administered to teachers and principals to obtain their level of achievement tendency. Profile of Organizational Characteristics, developed by Rensis Likert (1967), was administered to teachers and superiors of principals to determine their perceptions of principals' leadership behavior. Both instruments were administered to the participants by the researcher in a pre-arranged on-site testing session. Statistical Analysis. Collected instruments were scored manually, tabulated and described. Three hypotheses of the study were tested using Spearman's rank order correlation coefficient and Kendall's associated r to z transformation for testing the level of significance. The fourth hypothesis was tested using a One-Way Analysis of Variance and an associated F-test. All four hypotheses were tested at .05 level of significance. Findings. It was found that the principals' management systems were evaluated more frequently by teachers as System 3, while they were evaluated by principals' superiors in most cases as System 4. From testing of the hypotheses, it was found that there was not sufficient evidence to indicate a significant relationship between principals' achievement tendency and their leadership behavior as perceived either by teachers or superiors of principals. It was also found that there was not sufficient evidence to indicate a significant relationship between teachers' achievement tendency and their perceptions of principals' leadership behavior. Finally, it was found that there was not sufficient evidence to indicate significant differences among the means of teachers' perceptions of principals' leadership behavior in four groups of teachers, differentiated as high or low achiever teachers under high or low achiever principals. [...]