Relationship Between Teachers’ Followership Dimensions and Principals’ Leadership Effectiveness in Malaysian Public Secondary Schools

Yeo, Siew Pey (2022) Relationship Between Teachers’ Followership Dimensions and Principals’ Leadership Effectiveness in Malaysian Public Secondary Schools. PhD thesis, UNIVERSITI MALAYSIA SARAWAK.

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Abstract

The leadership field has aroused a distinctive interest due to its human influence in organizations. Hence, strengthening leadership effectiveness has emerged as a core concern in all organizations, including schools. However, numerous reports have demonstrated that poor efforts to strengthen leadership effectiveness in schools resulted in a loss of money and resources, as well as a failure to improve student performance in international assessments. Failures in organizations were probably triggered by an overemphasis on leaders and a disregard for other organizational elements such as followers. In reality, leadership and followership complemented each other in the pragmatic success of an organization. Unfortunately, there are relatively few studies have explored the potential effects of followership on leadership effectiveness, particularly in schools. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between Teachers’ Followership Dimensions and Principals’ Leadership Effectiveness in Malaysian public secondary schools with a follower-centric approach. The survey approach was employed in this quantitative study, with data collected using Google Form. Respondents were chosen via proportionate stratified random sampling from 43 public secondary schools in Sarawak. A total of 418 valid questionnaires were analysed with IBM-SPSS version 25.0 and IBM-SPSS-AMOS version 24.0 statistical software. Both Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were conducted to explore and confirm the underlying components for this study. Subsequently, a full-fledged Structural Equation Modeling was performed to answer all the research questions, test hypotheses, and assess the model fit of the data obtained. The findings revealed that teachers rate themselves as having high levels of followership dimensions such as Assume Responsibility, Serve, Take Moral Action and Participate in Transformation, but only moderate levels of Challenge. They also perceived their principals practised at a high level on all three components of Principals’ Leadership Effectiveness, namely Setting Directions, Developing People and Leader Dispositions. The findings also indicated that Teachers’ Followership Dimensions construct has statistically significant effect on the Principals’ Leadership Effectiveness. Using the path analysis, the Assume Responsibility_ Serve, Take Moral Action and Challenge components were identified as significant predictors of Principals’ Leadership Effectiveness, except for Participate in Transformation. According to the structural model, components of Teachers’ Followership Dimensions construct explained 35% of the total variance in measuring Principals’ Leadership Effectiveness. The study proved that the proposed TFD_PLE model fits the data collected from Malaysian public secondary schools. The findings may serve as a credible reference for both academics and practitioners in guiding them to understand what and how followership dimensions might accelerate the effectiveness of leadership development endeavours. This study makes a significant contribution by attempting to explore a new epoch in the field of educational leadership and management, which may be termed as educational followership. Keywords: Principals’ Leadership Effectiveness, Teachers’ Followership Dimensions, structural equation modelling, Malaysian public secondary schools

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