Strategic leadership in educational organizations and strategic leadership applications of school principals

The purpose of this study is to determine the opinions of teachers on strategic leadership applications of school principals and the factors affect these applications. The research was conducted by the use of survey method. 592 teachers among six different state vocational high schools in Eskişehir were the sample group of the study. 53,2 percent of the gathered data was used in the analysis. The data that was needed to attain the aims of this research was collected by means of a survey entitled ?The opinions of teachers working at the state vocational high schools about the strategic leadership applications of school principals? that was developed by the researcher.The techniques of frequency distributions and percentages were used to analyse the data to determine the opinions of teachers about the strategic leadership applications of school principals and the factors which affect these applications. ?Independent Sample T Test? and ?One-Way ANOVA? were used to determine the statistical differences between the ideas of teachers according to independent variables such as branch, seniority, management experience and school types. When the results of the T and F tests showed significant difference between the ideas, in order to determine the impact of them, ?2 (eta-squared) statistic was used. In the case of differences, ?LSD (Fisher?s Least Significant Difference) Test? was used to determine the source of difference. To determine the correlation between leadership features of school principals and the strategic leadership applications, Pearson?s correlation coefficient technique was used. For the statistical analysis, 0.05 significant level was used. SPSS 10.0 for windows package program was used for the statistical analysis.The results revealed that, the school principals were generally successful in strategic leadership applications, however, it was determined that, these applications need to be developed. There are significant differences between the opinions of school teachers about the strategic leadership applications of the school principals according to the management experience and the school variables. The results also showed that legal bureaucratic, time and economical sources partly limit the strategic leadership applications of the school principals. The opinions of teachers about the factors that limit the strategic leadership applications show a difference with respect to the independent variables such as branch and the school types in some extents; but it shows no difference with respect to the management experience and the seniority variables. It was concluded that there was a positive relation at high levels between the leadership features of school principals and the strategic leadership applications.