The effects of pedagogical leadership practice of primary school principals on principals' and teachers' psychological empowerment: The case of East Gojjam, Ethiopia

The research was undertaken to explore the effects of pedagogical leadership practice of primary school principals on principals' and teachers' psychological empowerment in the context of Ethiopia. There were three specific objectives of the research that the researcher explored. The first specific objective was to investigate the extent to which the principals have practiced pedagogical leadership. Secondly, the researcher planned to investigate the extent to which teachers and principals psychologically empowered based on psychological empowerment theory. The final objective was to explore the effects of pedagogical leadership practice of primary school principals on principals' and teachers' psychological empowerment. This dissertation was conducted in East Gojjam province, Ethiopia. The exploratory sequential mixed research design was used in this research. This method consists of two steps based on the aim of the study. Firstly, the researcher used an interview with five school principals and nine teachers. The NVivo used to analyze qualitative data. Secondly, the questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data. Fifty principals and four hundred twenty teachers have completed questionnaires. Quantitative data were analyzed using different descriptive and inferential statistics with the SPSS-20 program. The quantitative result showed both primary school teachers and principals had a positive (high level) level of perception about principals' practice of pedagogical leadership. On regarding of dimensions of psychological empowerment, according to teachers' and principals' point of view, they very highly perceived the value of a work or task(meaning), internalized school goals (goal internalization), and believed in their capacity to perform a job with skills (competence), but they highly felt the freedom and influence in initiating and performing work behaviors (influence) respectively. Generally, it can be said that both teachers and principals were psychologically empowered at the very high and high level. According to the views of the principal and teachers, the results of simple correlation analyses showed there was a significant relationship between each principal's practice of all four dimensions of pedagogical leadership and their psychological empowerment. Finally, the results of the hierarchical multiple linear regressions also showed principals' practices of pedagogical leadership significantly predicted primary school principals' and teachers' psychological empowerment.