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Journal of Education & Social Sciences - Volume 6, Issue 1 2018
By Martin Thomas, Margaret Madden
10.20547/jess0611806105
Keywords: Leader behaviours, initiating structure, consideration behaviour, leadership skills, organizational climate.
Educationists have been showing considerable interest in knowing factors affecting leader effectiveness. In the midst of ineffective educational leadership and educational leadership development programmes, leader behaviours are considered one of the important predictors of leadership effectiveness and thus to be developed in educational programmes. This One-Group Pretest-Posttest Experimental Research explored the extent to which the participation in a course unit of the Educational Leadership Programme, offered by the Centre of Educational Leadership Development (CELD), Karachi, Pakistan, developed the required leader behaviours among the postgraduate level students. Fleishman's Leadership Opinion Questionnaire (Pierce & Newstrom, 2005) was used for the pretest and the posttest. Participants of the research were eighty four (84) Postgraduate Certificate in Educational Leadership or Master of Educational Leadership students, who studied the Perspectives of Leadership unit. It was expected that this unit would not only assist students to build the strong knowledge base and acquire certain leadership skills, but also develop high level of appropriate behaviours which would prepare them to cope with the scope of the challenges which face them as well as create or maintain a positive, thriving organisational climate in their schools. Contrary to expected outcomes, the research revealed that the unit participants exhibited significant but relatively moderate orientation towards the expected leader behaviours. The research has challenged the legitimacy of the approaches used to teach the course and recommended a thorough study of the factors that contribute to the development of leader behaviours among leadership students.