Literature Review
The issue of leadership in education has become one of the pressing questions in the research community. In this report I will set an example of five articles discussing that topic which both utilize ANOVA method, and provide an analysis of them.
The articles discussing this topic in one or several aspects are as follows:
Canales, M. T., Tejeda-Delgado, C., & Slate, J. R. (2008) Leadership Behaviors of Superintendent/Principals in Small, Rural School Districts in Texas. Rural Educator, 29(3), pp. 1-7.
Rafiq Awan, M., & Mahmood, K. (2010) Relationship among leadership style, organizational culture and employee commitment in university libraries. Library Management, 31(4/5), pp. 253-266.
Scribner, J. P., Truell, A. D., Hager, D. R., & Srichai, S. (2001) An Exploratory Study of Career and Technical Education Teacher Empowerment: Implications for School Leaders. Journal of Career and Technical Education, 18(1), pp. 46-57.
Spotanski, D. R., & Carter, R. I. (1993) Self evaluation of leadership practices and behaviors used by department executive officers in agricultural education. Journal of Agricultural education, 34(3), pp. 17-25.
Vilkinas, T., & Ladyshewsky, R. K. (2012) Leadership behaviour and effectiveness of academic program directors in Australian universities. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 40(1), pp. 109-126.
The articles to be discussed are addressing various directions of the leadership in education, but similarity for all them is that they all utilize ANOVA method. All these articles are addressing the gap in the literature in the field of how leadership functions in the domain of education. It is notable that among them some present leadership as an independent variable, and another – as dependant. All articles in their theoretical reviews refer to the previous studies on leadership, namely leadership in education.Canales et al. (2008) are writing about the identify effective leadership behaviors exhibited by school managers as perceived by themselves, teachers, and school board presidents, and investigate similarities and differences in these perceptions. The theoretical literature review for this article was very modest, and mostly covered not the issue of leadership, yet the description of the methods. In this study, “all data were examined prior to analysis for normality and homogeneity of variance” (Canales et al., 2008, 3).
The ANOVA was used to identify, what effective leadership behaviors are exhibited by this category of officials, by teachers and by school board presidents, and what are the differences in the effective leadership behaviors. To achieve that, ANOVA was applied for several subscales, including representation, demand reconciliation, tolerance of uncertainty, persuasiveness, initiation of structure, and role assumption. It was found that “no statistically significant differences were found between the three groups in the six subscales of Tolerance of Freedom, Consideration, Production Emphasis, Predictive Accuracy, Integration, and Superior Orientation” (Canales et al., 2008, 6).
Thus, the results provide insights for improving administrative preparation program, where more emphasize should be made on the tolerance of freedom, representation and consideration of the administrators.Rafiq Awan & Mahmood (2010) are researching the leadership styles, …
