Characteristics of Effective School Principals Lokman Mohd Tahir; Hamdan Said Faculty of Education Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, 81310, Johore. Hamidon A. Rahman Institut Aminuddin Baki, 69000, Sri Layang, Genting Highlands Abstract Researchers in the area of principalship have concluded that schools are effectively good as their principals. Despite some influential work of the effective schools research, Malaysians school principals are urged by the our former Directors General of Education, Datuk Abdul Rafie Mahat to lead the schools with effective leadership to ensure that the bearing and tone of the schools are implemented successfully aligned with students’ needs, national priorities and vision. Being as the most powerful and …show more content…

Issues and perceptions of Effective Leadership Much of the prior research on leadership in educational institutions has focused primarily on analyses that involve the leaders’ perception of their own performance, leadership style, effectiveness, or the perception of their effectiveness evaluated by their superiors (Rosser 2003). Although superiors’ and subordinates evaluations are considered perceptual and may subjected to bias, learning the perceptions of those work with and for leaders is vital to understanding their effectiveness.

Measuring the effectiveness of leaders in the school setting is considered as a matter of perception. There are few shared norms about appropriate outcome measure for leaders in the educational context, unlike leaders in the area of business in which their performance may be assessed based on profit and growth. In fact, there is no commonly accepted definition of effective leadership in schools, and even less agreement about which aspect about which aspects of a definition may be most important to leadership effectiveness ( Bensimon & Newmann 1993; Rosser 2003). The issues of perceptions of effectiveness are based on what leaders say and do; that is grounded in the individual’s experience with leaders’ behavior, either directly and indirectly. From this experience, individuals determine whether their leaders are considered effective or ineffective. Perception may even be collected from a defined group of individuals in order to