Relationship Between the Leadership Styles of Principals and School Culture

While it may seem that in today\u27s society, the leaders of the school should primarily concentrate on curriculum, assessment, and accountability, there is one significant missing piece that is just as important: school culture. Recent educational reform efforts have focused on creating effective school cultures as a means of improving student achievement. Because the role of the principal is viewed as being essential to the successful implementation of these efforts, the demands on school leaders have continuously increased, which have created a multitude of challenges for school leaders across the nation. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the leadership style of principals and school culture as perceived by faculty. A total of 250 teachers from 50 elementary, middle, and high schools located in five school districts in the state of Georgia were selected to participate in this study. Data for this quantitative study were collected using the School Culture Survey, which assessed the following six factors of school culture: collaborative leadership, teacher collaboration, unity of purpose, professional development, collegial support, and learning partnership. In addition, the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire Form 5X was used to classify the leadership styles of principals as transformational, transactional, or laissez-faire. The means, standard deviations, and Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were used to examine the relationship between the variables. The results of this study indicated that there was a statistically significant relationship between most of the factors of the leadership styles of principals and the factors of school culture. More specifically, the findings indicated that a positive relationship existed between all of the factors of transformational leadership and all of the factors of school culture. In addition, one factor of transactional leadership, contingent reward, was positively correlated with school culture. On the contrary, a negative relationship existed between all of the factors of laissez-faire leadership and all of the factors of school culture