Many new developments are taking place in the field of schooling. Some of these developments are
school based management, Outcomes-Based Education, the National Curriculum Statement, and the
devolution of power of control to the school level, especially in Section 21 schools. Many educational
leaders are struggling with these changes in their leadership of secondary schools. These
developments created the need to conduct a needs analysis for the empowerment of managers of
secondary schools in transformational leadership in the Eastern Cape.
The specific objectives of this study were as follows:
- To investigate the basic principles and various dimensions of effective leadership in general and
transformational leadership in particular.
- To provide an exposition of how managers of secondary schools should execute their leadership
tasks in a transformational way.
- To determine the transformational leadership abilities of managers of secondary schools in the
Eastern Cape Province.
- To establish the transformational leadership empowerment needs of managers of secondary
schools in the Eastern Cape Province.
- To indicate guidelines for a series of empowering activities for training managers of secondary
schools to equip them with the necessary knowledge and skills for effective leadership in times of
transformation.
A literature study of transformational leadership was conducted to investigate the grounding
perspective of transformational leadership. For school managers as educational leaders to be forces
for change and improvement within their schools, they should have a vision of where to lead their
schools, a series of values and assumptions about their work and insight into the context in which they
are working. Therefore, school managers should become leaders inspiring creativity and higher levels of achievement. Thus, school managers should actively seek to motivate and develop educators by
creating opportunities for them to grow and to learn from each other.
Despite the fact that many researchers see transformational leadership as a comparatively better model
of leadership, some authors argue that it has weaknesses and criticize some of its activities as unethical
and immoral. Therefore, a critical reflection of transformational leadership was done. From the
foregoing discussion, it was deduced that the quality of any transformation process depends on the
caliber of leadership. Leadership gives direction and effectiveness to transformation because it forms
the basis for transformation. In essence, managers of secondary schools as transformational leaders
should concern themselves with the motivation, betterment and empowerment of followers. With
meaningful development and empowerment in place, transformational leadership provides an
appropriate solution to the challenges prevalent in schools today because it always seeks to confront
change as an opportunity rather than a threat.
To gather data, both quantitative and qualitative investigations were undertaken. A preliminary survey
was conducted on a sample (n = 43) from the same population as the primary study, using the
Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) to check on the need for this study. The results of this survey
indicated that managers of secondary schools performed leadership practices to a moderate degree.
The study was then considered to be necessary on the basis of the need for maximum possible
leadership practices during times of change. The primary data collection instrument was a researcherdesigned
questionnaire (RDQ) that was used to collect data from managers of secondary schools in the
Eastern Cape. Data were collected from a sample of 191 managers of secondary schools. Categories
and units of analysis were used for data analysis and for scoring data. After data capturing, data were
computed using STATA 8.2 and Excel. Data were then presented, interpreted and discussed. The
results indicated that managers of secondary schools have merely fair abilities in transformational
leadership and that they need empowerment in transformational leadership to a great extent.
It was necessary to get more clarity and further information on the abilities of and empowerment needs
of managers of secondary schools directly from participants (n = 9) that formed part of the population
studied. Thus, qualitative data was collected using interviews. Emergent themes and categories were
discussed in the data report on the findings of the qualitative investigation. Participants indicated
various leadership skills, abilities, actions and behaviours that are important for school managers to
portray and perform to lead their schools to effectiveness. It was evident from participants that school
managers were not adequately empowered in transformational leadership. Participants indicated that
school managers need continuous empowerment and induction/orientation on leadership knowledge
and skills to be able to perform their transformational leadership role effectively. On the basis of the findings from both the quantitative and qualitative research, a synthesis of the main findings was
made. Based on these findings, recommendations and conclusions were made. Possible areas for
further research were identified. Guidelines for a series of short courses for the empowerment of
managers of secondary schools in transformational leadership were given.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ufs/oai:etd.uovs.ac.za:etd-09052007-151350 |
| Date | 05 September 2007 |
| Creators | Mantlana, Christabel Dudu |
| Contributors | Prof NC de Wet, Prof SM Niemann |
| Publisher | University of the Free State |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en-uk |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.uovs.ac.za//theses/available/etd-09052007-151350/restricted/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University Free State or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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