Perceptions of School Leadership

Effective principal leadership practices improve school organization, teaching, and student achievement outcomes. These practices include framing and communicating a school's goals and mission, creating shared expectations of high performance, clarifying roles and objectives, and promoting professional development. However, research demonstrates that teachers tend to rate principals lower on important leadership practices than principals rate themselves, and this mismatch in perception could have negative consequences. Numerous studies in the fields of human resources and organizational management reveal that leader self-awareness — when leader self-perception is in agreement with what subordinates perceive — is directly related to leadership effectiveness. The degree to which leaders rate themselves more highly than do subordinates correlates with diminished organizational outcomes, including reduced subordinate job satisfaction and productivity. Specific to education, negative teacher perception of school leadership correlates with teacher burnout and reduced teacher collaboration. We used data from the RAND Corporation's web-based American Educator Panels to gather nationally representative evidence of whether perceptions of school leadership practices vary by educator position. We find that principals almost universally rate themselves as effective, but a minority of teachers disagree.