Public School Principal

CONTRIBUTION OF THE ROLE TO PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS

Greenfield (1991) has noted that the public school principal must play many roles: (1) managerial; (2) instructional;

(3) political; (4) social; and (5) moral. Several authors (e.g. Amey, 1991; Hutchinson, 1988) have characterized the principal's social role as that of being a human relation's agent.

However, the question can be asked: Can the public school principal effectively fulfill any of the just cited administrative roles without good human relations skills? This paper examines the principal's social or human relations role toward the objective of determining the extent to which the role of human relations agent is a defining characteristic of effective public school administration. In other words, the paper attempts to determine the relationship between human relation skills and effective public school leadership.

The central assumption of this study is that review of the existing literature on the role of the public school principal as a human relations agent will provide documentation justifying the assertion that this role is a pivotal characteristic of school leadership, and that without effective human relation skills, the public school principal will not be effective in any of the various administrative tasks to which he or she is assigned. This assumption can be translated to the following general hyp

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of Human Relations Approach To what extent does the existing research on leadership effectiveness support the notion that human relation skills are more important to successful supervision than technical skills or knowledge? Several studies in the educational and organizational literature have attempted to answer this question. For example, Cunard (1990) studied the instructional role of high school principals for leadership effectiveness. Cunard's findings indicated that principals were more effective instructional leaders when they exercised a democratic approach by sharing decisions about instruction with teachers. Indeed, the most effective principals were those who utilized such strategies as assigning teachers staff development responsibilities, creating an instructional council and an instructional dean position, and implementing techniques of peer coaching. The democratic approach and the use of collaboration between administrative and subordinate groups is a central characteristic of the human relations approach. Cunard's (1990) findings of more effective instructional leadership for high school principals using democratic and collaborative strategies to fulfill their instructional role is supportive of this pap
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2086
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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