A couple of days ago, I submitted an internet search for "school principal incompetence". The results were comprised mainly of articles addressing methods for school principals to deal with incompetent teachers, the opposite of what I had intended to find.
Previous to that, I had searched for "dark triad leadership in education", and "destructive leaders in education". While there is now a burgeoning field of study on the dark side of leadership (eg. Lipman-Bluman, Tourish, Kellerman, Kets de Vries) there's next to nothing that looks at the fact that the darker aspects of an educational leader's inner world may negatively impact the workplace.
So I am looking specifically--at least as a place to start--for research on teacher assessments or opinions of school principal leadership. I'd like to examine their responses to see perhaps whether teachers may be hinting that vestiges of the dark triad may be present in their school leader.
At the very least, I am looking for a more balanced approach to school principal leadership assessment. Logic says of course, not all bad leaders are all 'bad'...but leaders, not just educational leaders, are not 100% 'good', either. (Sometimes, however, you'd never know that from the literature...)
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Couple of years back when I was working at Indian Institute of Management of Ahmedabad, India, we were into studying and developing programmes for K12 school principals in India titled as 'Strategic Leadership in Changing Environment'. The following factors were being studied for a good principal-leader:
Management Innovation
Team Building
Decision Making
Teacher Development
Visionary Leadership
Effective Interface with Parents
Human Resources Management
Achieving Excellence
Use of Technology for School Operation Management & Monitoring
The studies done by different researchers also used to take into account the possible financial and technological availability at the school level eg. the difference between urban and rural school facilities in India. You may find some valuable information at IIMA publications.
Thank you, Ben! I did find an excellent article by Mulford/Silins, that has helped tremendously entitled "Successful School Leadership: What is it and Who Decides?"
Thank you, Sandeep! I especially appreciate the focus in the program you noted on Team Building and Decision-Making. That is an area over here where there seems to be a wide variation in principals' approaches to these variables. While there are many committees and school collegial counsels, I'm not sure that there is a sufficiently broad understanding of what Distributed Leadership really means in these settings. I'm going to look a bit deeper in the approach of the Institute.
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