Secondary Education Principals/Superintendents
OBJECTIVE This study was designed to inspect the degree to which exemplary Leadership could be predicted from a linear combination of moral attentiveness and resilience in organizational leadership. METHODOLOGY The participants in this study were leaders of schools with membership in the International Christian Accrediting Association (90 school systems in 13 countries). Fifty-one of the 128 invited to participate agreed and 47 provided usable data (37% response rate). Participants provided demographic information, and completed the Leadership Practices Inventory, the Moral Attentiveness Scale (Reynold, 2008), and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (Connor & Davidson, 2003). The typical respondent was female (60%), holding a master’s degree (52%), from the United States (79%), and, on average, was 50 years old, with over 15 years of overall leadership experience, including over 10 years in their current position. Internal reliability (Cronbach alpha) for the LPI overall was 0.91. In summary, the tests of assumptions indicated that the data met the accepted standards of normality, linearity, homoscedasticity as well as independence, and multicollinearity.
KEY FINDINGS Multiple regression analysis revealed that exemplary leadership (total LPI score) could be predicted from moral attentiveness and resilience in organizational leadership; accounting for 22 percent of the variance. Total years of leadership did account for a significant amount of variance in the LPI (exemplary leadership), although it added an additional one percent when combined with the previous two variables. Current years in the leadership position did not account for a significant amount of variance in the LPI, although it was significant when included in the equation along with moral attentiveness and resilience. The author notes:
Based on the results of the multiple regressions, resilience contributed, by far, the most to the linear prediction of exemplary leadership. Of the four predictors utilized in the three models, only resilience was a statistically significant predictor of exemplary leadership. The bivariate and partial correlation statistics for resilience remained constant at .50, indicating the sturdy predictive power of resilience for this sample. Neither of the control variables suggested by the literature made a significant contribution to the criterion. However, overall years of organizational leadership slightly improved the linear regression model of resilience and moral attentiveness, while years of current organizational leadership had a slight negative effect. In particular, the expected positive relationships between moral attentiveness and exemplary organizational leadership and current years of organizational leadership with exemplary organizational leadership were not realized. In fact, both predictors were found to have a very slight but negative influence on the criterion (p. 189).