Blazing New Trails - Connexions

32 CRITICAL ISSUES IN SHARED LEADERSHIP
principals, a combination of instructional leadership with the principles of transformational
leadership in which principals would create the vision for growth and change while more fully
utilizing teachers as partners.
Another theoretical framework which guided this study was managerial. The
management construct used in this study to measure principal workload pressure was taken
from the literature about the stressful factors that principals encounter (Cooley & Shen, 2003;
Fink & Brayman, 2006; Grubb & Flessa, 2006; Kafka, 2009; Schoen & Fusarelli, 2008).
These stressful factors could include political, managerial, or personal factors. We collapsed
the variables of the managerial, political, and personal issues and labeled these as managerial,
since the principal’s role demands management of each of these areas and because these
managerial issues have long dominated the research base (Hallinger, 1992).
METHOD OF THE STUDY
This quantitative study was structured to systematically examine the beliefs of K-12
principals regarding their workload expectations and stressors. Additionally, we sought to
examine principals’ beliefs regarding teacher involvement in minimizing principal workload
as measured by a modified Likert inventory consisting of questions which asked the
respondents about the stressors principals encounter, the roles teachers assume in their
buildings and principals’ preferences regarding which responsibilities teachers could assume
to alleviate the stress of the principalship (see Appendix A).
While the data in this study might appear to be ordinal in nature, the researchers have
converted the words on the Likert scale in a meaningful way to an interval scale treating it as
nominal data. This gives the researchers the ability to use totals or to calculate numerical
averages in order to facilitate analysis.
The data in this study supported the notion that the workload of the principal could be
classified as managerial or integrated leadership. Building on the premise that principals
must effectively work with the instructional and managerial issues of the school, we
developed a list of tasks and behaviors that engage principals for purposes of identifying and
clarifying which of those variables were stressful to the principals. We chose these two
constructs to guide the investigation of this study and subsequently developed variables from
the literature that would fully define each of the constructs.
The integrated leadership variables related to instruction, curriculum, and the
behaviors that a principal must navigate to successfully engage in transformational leadership.
The managerial variables related to the roles traditionally associated with the workload of the
principal and may include supervision, political or personal stressors. In addition, data in this
study also identified which roles these principals preferred to delegate and which roles were
already being performed by teachers.
Participants
Data for this study were collected through an electronic questionnaire distributed to all
principals working in K-12 school districts in a Midwestern state (n = 3084). The data from
the survey focused on the responses of 907 practicing principals who volunteered to complete
the online questionnaire administered through Survey Monkey®. The sample size supports a
99% confidence level as ascertained by the 933 responses received by the researchers.
Principals representing elementary (N = 511), middle school (N = 228) and high school
(N = 273) levels responded to the questionnaire. Approximately 20% of the participants had