As interpersonal relationships are closer in childcare centers than in any other educational institutions, the leadership of childcare center principals exerts a huge influence on the job satisfaction and job performance of teachers, which largely aff...
As interpersonal relationships are closer in childcare centers than in any other educational institutions, the leadership of childcare center principals exerts a huge influence on the job satisfaction and job performance of teachers, which largely affects, in turn, the quality of childcare services. Childcare center principals should exert a visionary leadership, which is to present a vision in line with today's needs for change and innovation, an insightful and persuasive leadership, which can serve to create a new organizational culture and new ethics, and a transformational leadership, which can ensure the validity and rationality of management. Indeed, it's required to boost the transformational leadership of principals and the job satisfaction and organizational commitment of teachers to enhance the quality of childcare centers and childcare services.
A survey was conducted on 287 teachers in childcare centers located in Seoul, and the collected data were analyzed to determine the impact of the transformational leadership of the principals of the childcare centers on the organizational commitment of the teachers and the moderating effects of their job satisfaction. The findings of the study were as follows:
First, the awareness and evaluation of the childcare centers about the transformational leadership of the principals had an influential relationship to their own personal characteristics, and their personal characteristics had an influential relationship to their organizational commitment as well. To be specific, the personal characteristics of the childcare center teachers made differences to their awareness and evaluation of the charisma, individual consideration, intellectual stimuli and motivation of the principals, which were the subfactors of transformational leadership. Also, there were differences among the teachers according to their personal characteristics in affective commitment, normative commitment and continuance commitment that were the subfactors of organizational commitment.
Second, the transformational leadership of the childcare center principals had an influential relationship with the affective, normative and continuance commitment of the teachers. The teachers who set lower value on the transformational leadership of the principals statistically significantly fell behind in terms of affective commitment at the 95% level of significance. This finding ascertained that better awareness of the transformational leadership of the principals led to better organizational commitment, and it could be interpreted that the transformational leadership of the principals had a positive influential relationship with the organizational commitment of the teachers.
Third, the job satisfaction of the childcare teachers had an influential relationship with the transformational leadership of the principals, and the former was positively affected by the latter. In other words, there were differences in average scores between the teachers who set lower value on the transformational leadership of the principals and the teachers who placed higher value on that, and the latter scored higher in job satisfaction than the former.
Fourth, the organizational commitment of the childcare teachers had an influential relationship with their job satisfaction, and the former was positively affected by the latter.
Fifth, the job satisfaction of the childcare teachers had a moderating effect on the relationship between the transformational leadership of the principals and the organizational commitment of the teachers.
The findings of the study show that the transformational leadership of the principals had a positive impact on the organizational commitment of the teachers, and that job satisfaction functioned as a moderating variable for the two variables. Therefore childcare centers should make an effort from diverse angles to bolster the transformational leadership of principals to take the job satisfaction and organizational commitment of teachers to another level.
Given the findings of the study, there are some suggestions on how to step up the improvement of the quality of childcare centers and childcare services:
First, childcare center leaders should have the right understanding of leadership and keep in mind that their leadership affects the psychology of teachers and consequently impacts on organizational efficiency. They should view their relationship with teachers not merely as an official relationship to attain organizational objectives but as a social relationship to affect mutual development.
Second, an autonomous climate and empowerment are increasingly prevailing in childcare centers. So principals should no longer treat teachers in a directive and authoritarian manner. Instead, they should offer a vision for teachers, be considerate of each of them and help them to set their own target. At the same time, they should have the right understanding of themselves, carefully listen to teachers, try to persuade them if there are any conflicts and lead them with devotion.