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Many new developments are taking place in the field of schooling. Some of these developments are school based management, Outcomes-Based Education, the National Curriculum Statement, and the devolution of power of control to the school level, especially in Section 21 schools. Many educational leaders are struggling with these changes in their leadership of secondary schools. These developments created the need to conduct a needs analysis for the empowerment of managers of secondary schools in transformational leadership in the Eastern Cape. The specific objectives of this study were as follows: - To investigate the basic principles and various dimensions of effective leadership in general and transformational leadership in particular. - To provide an exposition of how managers of secondary schools should execute their leadership tasks in a transformational way. - To determine the transformational leadership abilities of managers of secondary schools in the Eastern Cape Province. - To establish the transformational leadership empowerment needs of managers of secondary schools in the Eastern Cape Province. - To indicate guidelines for a series of empowering activities for training managers of secondary schools to equip them with the necessary knowledge and skills for effective leadership in times of transformation. A literature study of transformational leadership was conducted to investigate the grounding perspective of transformational leadership. For school managers as educational leaders to be forces for change and improvement within their schools, they should have a vision of where to lead their schools, a series of values and assumptions about their work and insight into the context in which they are working. Therefore, school managers should become leaders inspiring creativity and higher levels of achievement. Thus, school managers should actively seek to motivate and develop educators by creating opportunities for them to grow and to learn from each other. Despite the fact that many researchers see transformational leadership as a comparatively better model of leadership, some authors argue that it has weaknesses and criticize some of its activities as unethical and immoral. Therefore, a critical reflection of transformational leadership was done. From the foregoing discussion, it was deduced that the quality of any transformation process depends on the caliber of leadership. Leadership gives direction and effectiveness to transformation because it forms the basis for transformation. In essence, managers of secondary schools as transformational leaders should concern themselves with the motivation, betterment and empowerment of followers. With meaningful development and empowerment in place, transformational leadership provides an appropriate solution to the challenges prevalent in schools today because it always seeks to confront change as an opportunity rather than a threat. To gather data, both quantitative and qualitative investigations were undertaken. A preliminary survey was conducted on a sample (n = 43) from the same population as the primary study, using the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) to check on the need for this study. The results of this survey indicated that managers of secondary schools performed leadership practices to a moderate degree. The study was then considered to be necessary on the basis of the need for maximum possible leadership practices during times of change. The primary data collection instrument was a researcherdesigned questionnaire (RDQ) that was used to collect data from managers of secondary schools in the Eastern Cape. Data were collected from a sample of 191 managers of secondary schools. Categories and units of analysis were used for data analysis and for scoring data. After data capturing, data were computed using STATA 8.2 and Excel. Data were then presented, interpreted and discussed. The results indicated that managers of secondary schools have merely fair abilities in transformational leadership and that they need empowerment in transformational leadership to a great extent. It was necessary to get more clarity and further information on the abilities of and empowerment needs of managers of secondary schools directly from participants (n = 9) that formed part of the population studied. Thus, qualitative data was collected using interviews. Emergent themes and categories were discussed in the data report on the findings of the qualitative investigation. Participants indicated various leadership skills, abilities, actions and behaviours that are important for school managers to portray and perform to lead their schools to effectiveness. It was evident from participants that school managers were not adequately empowered in transformational leadership. Participants indicated that school managers need continuous empowerment and induction/orientation on leadership knowledge and skills to be able to perform their transformational leadership role effectively. On the basis of the findings from both the quantitative and qualitative research, a synthesis of the main findings was made. Based on these findings, recommendations and conclusions were made. Possible areas for further research were identified. Guidelines for a series of short courses for the empowerment of managers of secondary schools in transformational leadership were given. |
