This research focuses on the role that trust and its component facets - competence, benevolence, openness, reliability and honesty (Tschannen-Moran, 2004) - play in affecting teachers’ inclination to exercise informal leadership. Teachers in the elementary sections of three elite urban independent schools in Ontario nominated colleagues as informal teacher leaders in their schools and a total of nine teachers, who received multiple nominations, were selected for interview. The interviews unexpectedly revealed two distinct experience-based groupings of informal teacher leaders, with the members of the two groups exhibiting distinctive leadership behaviours. Trust was an important factor affecting all of the teacher leaders’ inclination to exercise informal leadership, but the two experience-based groups revealed different patterns of emphasis for the trust facets (for example, the less-experienced leaders highlighted benevolence above all other facets while the more-experienced teachers considered openness to be the most important). The findings have implications for the ways in which schools can promote the exercise of informal leadership.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/33928 |
| Date | 10 December 2012 |
| Creators | Baxter, Mark |
| Contributors | Anderson, Stephen |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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