International Journal of Organizational Leadership

This basic qualitative study explores Chinese high school principals' concepts, experiences, and opinions in building a professional learning community for student achievement in China. The semi-structural interview protocol was used to collect data from Chinese principals (N = 12) to investigate their challenges for school practical recommendations. Findings show that principals face three major challenges: (1) high exam score culture and top schools cause disengagement and lose educational core values; (2) parent high expectation causes difficulty of school growth; (3) lack of enough educational resources cause insufficient administration, teaching, and learning. In addition, findings show that principals play three major roles: (1) reconciling top-down policy intent role; (2) head role; (3) mediating role. Further, this study found that principals use three strategies to build a professional learning community: (1) communication, (2) value-based policy, and (3) engagement with a high salary and support program. Finally, this study found that school principals need to shift from the high testing score to emphasize educational core values. They also need to shift from power and authority to transformational, distributed, social-justice, and Junzi leadership; and from student testing score sole evaluation system to integrated teaching pedagogical support system for delivering high-quality teaching. Therefore, future studies could use the exploratory sequential mixed methods research design to explore how school principals use social justice, distributed, Junzi, and transformational leadership in the K-12 school contexts in the United States and China.

This article focuses on principals' leadership style in private schools in Nepal regarding their job experience, age factors, level of education, and gender issues. It is based on the three dimensions of the leadership of Principals. They are democratic, autocratic, and laissez-faire, and they were examined with the rating style questionnaires as perceived by principals themselves and their teachers. The population sample of this study covered 78 principals and 163 teachers of different private higher secondary schools. The data for the qualitative study were collected, and Stata programming was applied as a statistical tool. The findings of this research indicated that most respondents, including principals themselves with different demographic characters, gave a high score for the democratic leadership styles of the principals. Basically, no variation was noted between the leadership style of male and female principals. But, respondents of academically highly qualified female teachers and more experienced teachers gave high scores for autocratic and laissez-faire leadership style in relation to few management functions like decision making, goal setting, and communication only. Conclusively, the democratic leadership style of principals was highly desirable, but autocratic leadership style and laissez-faire leadership styles were deemed desirable.

The world is now facing such a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous situation known as VUCA that it has generated such new challenges. Therefore, it is imperative that a leader to have competences that always grow. Transformational leadership is a type of leadership deemed superior to anticipate those challenges, where a leader is supposed to always be agile in achieving the organizational goals. This study aimed at analyzing a correlation among leadership aspects (through Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire/MLQ assessment), cognitive functions (through Wechsler Bellevue assessment), and brain activity pattern/brain mapping (through Electroencephalography/EEG). Then, we gave a stimulus through neurofeedback to train the participants’ control over their brain waves. The results revealed that all participants that became the research samples had a transformational leadership type with idealized influence (behavior) and inspirational motivation subtypes. Moreover, the presence of stimulation to the brain (neurofeedback) enabled the participants to control their brain waves when they were conscious. The leaders will be able to perform optimally when they can control their brain waves and when they are conscious.

The world has changed as we entered the new situation full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. To be able to cope with this situation, an organization has to translate the challenges into a clear vision and action. A leadership style that is agile to adapt with the magnitude and the characteristic of the occurring problem is needed. Transformational leadership is a participative leadership style that is not only able to motivate and drive the organization vertically and horizontally but also always be agile in every circumstance. Thus, the organizational capacity to achieve the shared vision and mission will be encouraged. Applied neuroscience gives an understanding about the activities and mechanism of the brain which improves the required competences of a leader. Therefore, applied neuroscience will help a leader transform the organization. This study shows that applied neuroscience can help a transformational leadership achieve a “physically, emotionally, and mentally safe” state and encourage an organization to transform itself effectively.This study does not only explore a new perspective of transformational leadership issues, but it also provides an important contribution related to applied neuroscience, in particular, mapping transmission mechanism of the brain activities affecting body’s reaction, internally (emotions and hormone) and externally (body reaction), which further affect the transformational leadership behaviors.