Analyzing the Link between Distributed Leadership and Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs at Secondary School Level

Abstract

School head teachers can no longer lead their schools on your own; they are obligated to cooperate with their leadership team members. They assign various leadership functions to teachers and allow them to contribute in decision-making process. In this context, this correlational study was mainly intended to analyze secondary school teachers’ perceptions regarding various functions of distributed leadership and to find out their relative weight in terms of predicting secondary school teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Furthermore, the effect of three demographical variables (i.e., gender, experience, school sector) was also studied in predicting teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. A randomly selected sample of 1335 secondary school teachers completed self-report questionnaire comprising three parts i.e., demographic section, 23 item Distributed Leadership Inventory (Hulpia et al., 2009) and 10 item Teacher Self-efficacy Scale (Schwarzer et al.,1999). Results of descriptive analysis revealed that secondary school teachers perceived themselves as highly self-efficacious. Pearson correlation coefficient showed that all the independent variables related to distributed leadership i.e., support, supervision and coherent leadership team and dependent variable i.e., teacher self-efficacy were found to be substantially related with each other. Standard multiple regression analysis indicated that coherent leadership team variable was the strongest predictor of secondary school teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Results also suggested that coherence among leadership team affects secondary school teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs more positively in comparison with all the other independent variables. As regards demographical variables, school sector found to be a significant predictor of secondary school teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Finally, this study recommends that school leaders should work in cooperation with all the teachers with a clear view on school goals in a trustworthy and open environment avoiding any role conflicts.