رهبران تحول بخش در مدرسه: مديران زن يا مديران مرد؟

Transformational leaders in schools: Male or female principals?

Recent developments in leadership theories and styles have shifted interest from classic styles to transformational leadership style. This new style has become a popular model of leadership in most organizations especially, in educational organizations. Transformation occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivations and morality. Bass (1985) mentioned that transformational leaders motivate followers to performance beyond expectations and he also suggested that there were four different components of transformational leadership including Intellectual Stimulation, Individualized Consideration, Inspirational Motivation, and Idealized Influence. Transformational leadership has been widely linked to positive individual and organizational consequences, typically, with higher trust in leader and organizational citizenship behavior of employees. Although a number of studies have investigated gender differences in leadership style but empirical evidence surrounding the gender differences in transformational leadership is relatively scarce. It has, however, been suggested that female leaders may be more transformational than males. Despite evidences which emphasis on female advantages, research about differences of male and female principals in transformational leadership and teacher related consequences have yielded contradictory findings. Therefore the question remains as whether women and men are equally likely to be transformational leaders or does oneʹs sex have a slight advantage? The purpose of this study is to examine gender differences in transformational leadership components of male and female principals and their effect on teacher trust in principal and organizational citizenship behavior. A sample including 200 female teachers and 36 female principals of girlsʹ primary school and 200 male teachers and 41 male principals of boysʹ primary school of Tehran city were selected and data were collected