Date of Award

1988

Degree Name

Educational Leadership

College

College of Education and Professional Development

Type of Degree

Ed.D.

Document Type

Dissertation

First Advisor

Richard Meckley

Second Advisor

Richard Hartnett

Third Advisor

Larry Froehlich

Fourth Advisor

Richard Hunt

Fifth Advisor

Ken Young

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between a principal’s self-perceived leader style, self-perceived job stress and self-reported demographics.

The three null hypotheses were answered by analyzing data collected from a stratified random sampling of elementary and secondary principals in the West Virginia public school system. A three part questionnaire was used to collect the data. The first section of the questionnaire consisted of twelve statements regarding demographic information. The second section consisted of Hersey & Blanchard’s LEAD-Self instrument. The third section consisted of Tung & Koch's revised Administrative Stress Index which contained twenty-five job related stressor statements. Responses to these twenty-five items determined each principal’s perceived job stress within its task based, role based, conflict mediating, and boundary spanning dimensions.

Questionnaires were sent to 320 public elementary and secondary school principals. The total response rate after two mailings was 200 (62.5%) of which 196 (61%) were usable. This equated to 107 usable elementary principal responses (63% of total elementary principals sampled) and 89 usable secondary principal responses (59% of total secondary principals sampled). The Analysis of Variance, GLM procedure, was used to test the three stated null hypotheses at a statistical significance of 0.05. Based on the data, it was determined that there is no significant relationship between principals’ self-perceived leader style and self-perceived job stress. Statistically significant differences were found between male and female principals' perceived job stress; elementary and secondary principals' perceived job stress; and within the four dimensions of perceived job stress. The data further indicated that elementary and secondary principals perceive the same mean stress level for the job stress dimension, conflict mediating stress.

Note(s)

The University of West Virginia College of Graduate Studies became the WV Graduate College in 1992 and was subsequently merged with Marshall University in 1997.

Subject(s)

School principals – Job stress.

School principals – Self-rating of.

Leadership.

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