The purpose of this study was to find out the relationship between principals' leadership style and teachers' job satisfaction in order to suggest what role principal should play in improving school performance, how teachers' job satisfaction could be...
The purpose of this study was to find out the relationship between principals' leadership style and teachers' job satisfaction in order to suggest what role principal should play in improving school performance, how teachers' job satisfaction could be increased and how school education could produce better results. These research questions to achieve the purpose of this study were set as follows: What are the leadership styles of middle school principal? What are the factors of the job satisfaction of middle school teachers? What is the relationship between principals' leadership style and teachers' job satisfaction?
For this purpose of this study, the principals' leadership style and teachers' job satisfaction were analyzed. In order to analyze principals' leadership style, LBDQ-KOR was used. To analyze teachers' job satisfaction, the questionnaires constructed by the Korean Institute for Research in the Behavioral Sciences(KIRBS) were used. In order to do survey, 303 teachers were randomly sampled from middle schools in the G city by school foundation type, school size, gender, teaching career. The findings of the study were as follows:
First, the principals' leadership styles were classified into three types such as the goal-oriented, the bureaucracy-oriented, and the human-oriented. In case of principals' human-oriented leadership style, private school principals showed higher than public school principals, and male teachers perceived the human-oriented leadership higher than female teachers. Teachers with over 21~30 years of teaching career perceived higher than teachers with less 10 years of teaching career. In case of principals' goal-oriented leadership style, the schools with under 12 classes size perceived highest among others. In case of principals' bureaucracy-oriented leadership style, public school principals showed the bureaucracy-oriented leadership higher than private school principals, and teachers with 11~20 years of teaching career perceived higher than teachers with less 10 years of teaching career.
Second, teachers' job satisfaction was composed of ten factors such as promotion, job stability, job performance, human relationship, the way of supervision, pay, public welfare, communication, teaching load, and school administration. The results of analyzing teachers' job satisfaction according to teachers' background variables showed as follows: According to the foundation type of schools, private school teachers are more satisfied with pay, teaching load, public welfare, job stability, job performance than public school teachers; according to school size, teachers of 13~24 classes are more satisfied with teaching load, public welfare and the way of supervision than others; according to gender, male teachers are more satisfied with pay, communication, job stability than female teachers; according to teaching career, teachers with over 31 years of teaching career are more satisfied with pay, teaching load, public welfare and communication than others.
Third, the effect of principal's leadership on teachers' satisfaction showed as follows: The human-oriented leadership affected teaching load, public welfare positively; and the goal-oriented leadership affected positively human relationship, school administration and promotion, but the bureaucracy-oriented leadership did negatively; the goal-oriented leadership affected communication, job stability and job performance positively. The human-oriented and the goal-oriented leadership had a positive correlation with the way of supervision, whereas the bureaucracy-oriented leadership showed a negative correlation.
Consequently, school principals should refrain from exerting the bureaucracy-oriented leadership, but exert more the human-oriented and the goal-oriented leadership to increase teachers' job satisfaction.