Leadership styles of high school principals

Schools which have educational institutions have great duties and responsibilities in raising the children and youth who form the basis of society. School heads have a specific leadership style in schools as the direct practitioners in the education field. School principals are influenced by their perspective and leadership preferences towards their school, the people they work with, students and parents when they create the leadership style they practice. In addition, the ever-evolving information age requires managers to be open to changes. Although a number of research specialists and studies have been handled in our country to examine the leadership styles of high school managers, the number and extent of them are very limited. It is seen that the studies in the literature are mostly focused on leadership-related facts. The study was conducted to detect the leadership styles of high school managers in Izmir province during the academic year 2018-2019. Our study was conducted based on the concepts of leadership styles of high school principals. The purpose of the investigation is to determine teachers' opinions about the leadership styles of the principals. Since our study purposes to examine the leadership styles of high school principals, descriptive tracing model and quantitative research methods have been used. In order to determine the leadership styles of the high school principals, the OMLS (School Principals Leadership Style Scale) developed by Akan, Yıldırım and Yalçın (2014, 392-415) was applied to teachers working in high schools in the six districts of in the province of İzmir. In this study, the data were analyzed by using mean, standard deviation, t-test and one way analysis of variance (F test) in order to research whether there is a difference in terms of gender, branch, professional seniority, managerial experience, and length of duty in the school. According to the research results, it can be said that the leadership style that is the most common leadership style of the high school principals is the transformational leadership, and that the transactional leadership style is the second most common leadership and the laissez-faire leadership style is the least seen leadership. In addition, it can be said that the leadership styles of high school principals show no significant differences in terms of gender, branch, professional seniority, school working time of teachers, and it can be said that teachers have significant differences in terms of transformational leadership dimension according to the variables of management experience or not. As a result of the study, some solution suggestions have been presented in order to increase the transformational leadership style levels of high school principals.