Who is motivated to become a leader and shape the landscape? Personal and situational factors influencing teachers to seek educational leadership positions
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
Annual Conference of the British Educational Leadership, Administration and Management Society 2014
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
When asking whether leaders can shape the (educational) landscape, it also seems important to go even a step further back in individual trajectories and investigate who is (still) motivated to take on the challenge of being the leader of a school?
The present research is based on an extensive international literature review on school leadership aspirations and motives. Results from this review will be presented and completed with original research results from the ELMO (Educational Leadership MOtivation) study conducted in Austria. Several hundred teachers and school leaders filled in an online questionnaire with self-constructed items (e.g. job-related values, situational aspects) as well as items from standardised psychological inventories (e.g. Big 5, narcissism, motivation to lead, interests). In the context of school leadership motivation it seems especially important also to include individuals? subjective evaluation of specific situations (cf. Mischel, 2004, on the interaction of person and situation) as, e.g. the additional monetary allowance for being a school leader is often highly standardised, but individual teachers attribute different importance to that.
The results have shown that e.g. the amount of administrative work, inadequacy of monetary compensation for additional responsibility and work load, but also lack of transparency of the recruitment process are disincentives to apply for leadership. Interestingly, the aspect of earning more money was also ranked among the incentives of becoming a school leader. However, one of the most important motives why teachers would like to be a leader is the wish to make a change and shape the educational landscape.