A research on the strategic leadership behaviors of school administrators: Erdemli example

The concept of strategic leadership has been struck by a study of senior management of organizations that Hambrick and Mason conducted in 1984. When it came to 1996, Zaccaro's work was defined as follows: "A set of activities that direct the development and management of organizations as a whole to reflect long-term policies" (Akgemci, 2008). Strategic leader has the abilities of seeing the future, creating vision, being flexible and strengthening his subordinates, and is the person who makes strategic changes in need with these talents (Ülgen and Mirze, 2010) This research was conducted to determine the strategic leadership levels of school administrators working in public high schools and to examine the effect of teachers' demographic variables on teachers' perceptions of school administrators' leadership behaviors. In this research, which is a cross-sectional survey model, Strategic Leadership Scale (SLÖ) developed by John Pisapia (2009) and used as a quantitative data collection tool by Ömür Çoban (2016) was used as data collection tool. The sample of the research consists of 185 participants who were determined by simple randomization method among the 562 educators working in the high school in Mersin Province Erdemli District in the academic year of 2017-2018. The analysis and statistical results of the research data were obtained from the IBM SPSS 20.00 program. Frequency and percentage distribution were used in the analysis of data for demographic variables. T-test in independent groups to determine whether scale scores differ significantly by sex and where they live; one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used when the differences were examined according to age groups, education status and study duration variables, and LSD test was applied in evaluating variances. As a result of the analysis of the research; it is observed that the managerial, transformational, ethical, political and relational leadership scores of the school administrators are at a high level from the Strategic Leadership sub-dimensions and they show the most managerial leadership behaviors within this scope. It has also been found that perceptions of the transformational, political and relational leadership behaviors, which are the sub-dimensions of school leaders' strategic leadership, differ significantly according to the age of the teachers. According to the study period variable, only significant difference was found in managerial leadership behavior; sex, place of residence and educational status.