Leadership Style and School Culture as Perceived by Teachers in Malaysian Northern State Schools

Abstract

This chapter explores the effective leadership style for positive school culture as perceived by some Malaysian Northern State school teachers. This chapter uses focus group and open-ended questions to have in-depth understanding and testing of the participants' ability of suggesting or predicting the best or most effective school leadership style for building school positive culture for best leadership practices. The participants were teachers from different schools in Northern States Malaysia undertaking master program in educational management at Universiti Utara Malaysia. The findings revealed that transformational leadership style was rated, predicted, and ranked as the best leadership style for school principals to apply in building positive school culture according to their context while distributed leadership and instructional leadership could be also considered as the second leadership styles for building positive school culture in the Northern schools of Malaysia.

Online Educators’ Leadership Styles and Sources of Their Support

“…Based on the theory by Mead, Blumer, Ervin, and Goffman (Kőnig and Zedler, 2001) interaction does not take place according to the principle of reaction to stimulations, but that interaction occurs via symbolical interaction between me (social self) as determined by the role that is assigned to an individual within a group, And (I as the subject) is the individual's reaction to Me; Self (identity) stems from the relationship between Me and I, in our research it is confirmed the theoretical concept that teachers would lead teaching process on platform based on symbolical principle that: humans do not respond to stimulants but act on the meanings they attach to a particular situation; subjects, persons and situations have the same meaning as defined by the rules for all persons belonging to a particular group; In addition, objects, persons and situations have a "subjective meaning" for each individual, whereby the person concerned interprets the general rules of conduct. Echoing previous studies that have made in campus and online settings (Amzat & Yusuf 2019, Uleanya et al, 2019, Farahnak et al 2019, Solomon, 2019, we also identified three leadership style, and identified that participants tend to prefer liberal leadership (M = 3.01) over the autocratic one (M = 2.93) and the least preferred leadership style is the democratic one (M = 2.68). This can be explained as follows: educators, no matter whether they going to be on campus or online settings would respond to stimulants or duty requests, and would lead the teaching process.…”

“…Online educators are also leaders of their teaching and learning process. There are numerus papers about leadership style and its influence on learning culture and clime in traditional settings (Amzat & Yusuf 2019, Uleanya et al, 2019, Farahnak et al 2019 but not many researches in online settings. Solomon (2019), find positive a relationship between leadership style and school culture of private secondary schools.…”