The relationship of instructional leadership, teacher's organizational commitment and students' achievement in small schools

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Date
2010-06
Authors
Ponnusamy, Premavathy
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Abstract
The leadership of the headmasters is known to be a key factor in supporting teachers’ performance in terms of their organizational commitment and students’ achievement. Teachers play an important role in educating the future members of the society especially in primary schools where effective teaching and guidance leads to the country’s academic advancement. The researcher feels that this study is very timely as the Ministry of Education focuses more on small schools’ instructional leadership in order to evaluate their effectiveness. Based on the importance of the contribution of primary schools to the Malaysian Education System, this study was aimed at investigating the relationship between instructional leadership, teachers’ organizational commitment and students’ achievement in primary schools especially in small schools. This study used quantitative methods in order to obtain the relationship between the instructional leadership, teachers’ organizational commitment and students’ achievement. Data were collected using two questionnaires, Hallinger’s (1983) The Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS) – Teacher Form and Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (Malay version) by Abdul Ghani Ganeson (2002) adapted from Mowday, Steers and Porter (1979). These questionnaires were distributed to the teachers in 14 small primary schools and the data was analysed with SPSS Version 16.0 using correlational research design and the hypotheses were tested. The regression analysis showed that instructional leadership practice was partially related to the internal orientation dimension of organizational commitment. Out of three dimensions of instructional leadership, only two dimensions (D1 & D3) had a significant and a positive influence on the internal orientation of organizational commitment. There was also a positive relationship between the external orientation dimension of teachers’ organizational commitment and students’ academic achievement. However, there was an insignificant relationship between instructional leadership and students’ achievement. Although the under-enrolled schools are small organizations, the results of this study are still similar to the earlier findings. Nevertheless, there was a mediating effect of external orientation dimension of teachers’ organizational commitment on the relationship between instructional leadership and students’ academic achievement. Even though small schools undoubtedly contribute towards the country’s overall academic performance, research on the effectiveness of these schools is rarely conducted. Therefore, the findings of this study, especially the implications and recommendations would be beneficial and could be added to future literature. It would also be interesting to evaluate the link between the three dimensions of the instructional leadership, internal orientation of organizational commitment, external orientation of organizational commitment and students’ academic achievement in larger samples, and across different states. The researcher feels that time constraints was a limiting factor in this study and recommends that future research should use mixed methods, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to obtain a detailed outcome.
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Keywords
Business Administration , Instructional Leadership
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