INFLUENCE OF PRINCIPALS' LEADERSHIP STYLES ON THE TEACHERS' PERFORMANCE IN GOVERNMENT SECONDARY SCHOOLS OF HAWASSA CITY ADMINISTRATION, SIDAMA NATIONAL

Abstract

The success of a school is significantly influenced by the teacher competencies. The principal should employ a leadership style that fosters teachers' competence, growth, and development in order to increase teacher performance. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to assess the influence of principals' leadership styles on the teachers' performance in government secondary schools of Hawassa City Administration, Sidama National Regional State, Ethiopia. To accomplish this, the study employed a descriptive survey design. The study was carried out in ten government secondary schools of Hawassa City Administration. A total of 312 respondents have participated in the study. Among them, 270 teachers were taken as a sample through simple random sampling technique. Additionally, 30 government school principals were included through purposive sampling technique. Questionnaire was distributed to teachers and school principals and interview were conducted with supervisors of the schools. Mean and standard deviations were used to analyze quantitative data while independent sample t-test was used to test the significance. The findings indicate that autocratic leadership style is dominantly practiced by principals in the school. Also, principals were intermittently controlling teachers and majority of the respondents reported that the principals make decisions dependently with little input from the rest of the group. In general, the result supposed to conclude, that principals’ leadership style of government secondary schools of Hawassa City Administration had significance influences on decision-making and delegation to improve the level of teachers’ performance and thus teachers have not been performing to the expectation. This may be especially when the teachers are not convincible, not flexible and strongminded. Therefore, the way of principals’ leadership was not implemented as expected. Based on the findings, it is recommended that the principals of governmental secondary schools should use a mixture of leadership styles