The Effect of Authentic Leadership on School Culture: A Structural Equation Model

Resumen

In the study, the effect of school principals’ authentic leadership behaviors on teachers’ perceptions of school culture was tested with the structural equation model. The study was carried out with the correlation research design. Authentic leadership behavior was taken as the independent variable, and school culture was taken as the dependent variable. The participants in the study were 256 teachers from 15 elementary schools. In the study, the research data were collected with the Authentic Leadership Scale (Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing & Peterson, 2008) and the Organizational Culture Scale (Karada?, 2009). The Authentic Leadership Scale included the factors of (i) self-awareness, (ii) transparency in relations, (iii) balanced processing and (iv) internalized ethical viewpoint; as for the Organizational Culture Scale, it was made of such factors as (i) managerial and (ii) aim. In the study, in order to test the structural equation model formed theoretically, path analysis was conducted to investigate the appropriate models and to combine the measurement error in both latent and observed variables. The findings obtained demonstrated that the school principals’ authentic leadership behaviors had positive effect on teachers’ perceptions of school culture.