Leadership style of school principals’ in Primary Education: The role of Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

The purpose of this study was the measurement of the level of the emotional intelligence that the school principals may have, in the primary education field, together with the investigation of the leadership style that they apply in their school unit. Correlations between the emotional intelligence and the transformational leadership style have also been included in the present study.
A quantitative cross-sectional study was implemented. For the data collection, 2 structured questionnaires were used. The participants were 214 school teachers, from which 51 of them were school principals and 163 were teachers. The findings of the research showed that transformational leadership is the style that the principles tend to apply in the school units. In addition, significant findings showed that the characteristics of the transformational leadership style are statistically correlated to the leadership outcomes, which have been measured with certain elements, such as the job satisfaction, the effective-ness and the extra effort. Regarding the emotional intelligence score level, results showed that the increase of its scales is being followed by the increase of the transformational leadership style. The findings of the present study demonstrated the transformational leadership style together with the high level of the emotional intelligence of principles in the primary education field.