Principal time management skills. Explaining patterns in principals’ time use, job stress, and perceived effectiveness
| Published date | 07 September 2015 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-09-2014-0117 |
| Pages | 773-793 |
| Date | 07 September 2015 |
| Author | Jason A. Grissom,Susanna Loeb,Hajime Mitani |
| Subject Matter | Education,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy |
Principal time management skills
Explaining patterns in principals’time use,
job stress, and perceived effectiveness
Jason A. Grissom
Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Susanna Loeb
Graduate School of Education,
Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA, and
Hajime Mitani
Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Abstract
Purpose –Time demands faced by school principals make principals’work increasingly difficult.
Research outside education suggests that effective time management skills may help principals meet
job demands, reduce job stress, and improve their performance. The purpose of this paper is to
investigate these hypotheses.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors administered a time management inventory
to nearly 300 principals in Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the fourth-largest school district in the
USA. The authors analyzed scores on the inventory descriptively and used them to predict time-use
data collected via in-person observations, a survey-based measure of job stress, and measures
of perceived job effectiveness obtained from assistant principals and teachers in the school.
Findings –Principals with better time management skills allocate more time in classrooms and to
managinginstruction in their schools butspend less time on interpersonalrelationship-building.Perhaps
as a result of this tradeoff, the authors find thatassociations between principal timemanagement skills
and subjective assessments of principal performance are mixed. The authors find strong evidence,
however, that time management skills are associated with lower principal job stress.
Practical implications –Findings suggest that building principals’time management capacities
may be a worthwhile strategy for increasing time on high-priority tasks and reducing stress.
Originality/value –This study is the first to empirically examine time management among school
principals and link time management to key principal outcomes using large-scale data.
Keywords Stress, Time, Educational administration, Effectiveness, Administrators
Paper type Research paper
In pursuit of a more nuanced understanding of school leadership practice and the
connection between leadership practice and school improvement, several recent studies
have focussed on how principals allocate their time within the work day (e.g. Camburn et al.,
2010; Goldring et al., 2008; Grissom et al., 2013; Horng et al., 2010; Spillane et al., 2007;
Spillane and Hunt, 2010). These studies highlight the large and diverse set of school
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 53 No. 6, 2015
pp. 773-793
©Emerald Group Publis hing Limited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-09-2014-0117
Received 19 September 2014
Revised 18 December 2014
6 January 2015
Accepted 10 February 2015
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
This research was supported by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences at the US
Department of Education (R305A100286). The authors thank the leadership of the Miami-Dade
County Public Schools for their cooperation and assistance with data collection. The authors are
especially thankful to Gisela Feild for making this work possible. The authors are also grateful to
Mari Muraki for excellent data management. All errors are the responsibility of the authors.
773
Principal time
management
skills
functions with which principals engage on a daily basis, spanning instruction, personnel,
budgeting, student services, external relations, and a host of other areas. The large set of job
responsibilities with which principals are faced make time a scarce resource –and one that
is only becoming scarcer as federal, state, and district policies create more comprehensive
teacher observation and evaluation systems that require substantial time investment from
school leaders (Donaldson, 2011). Given this scarcity, principals must make decisions about
how to allocate their time among competing job demands. These time-use decisions are
important for effective leadership, as evidencedbytherelationshipbetweenprincipaltime
use and school outcomes (e.g. Grissom et al., 2013; Horng et al., 2010).
The connection between time use and performance motivates the present study.
We proceed from the expectation that some principals have a greater capacity for
investing their time on productive activities. This greater capacity for using time
effectively is known both colloquially and in a relatively large literature in psychology
and organizational behavior as time management. That literature suggests that better
time management skills –which include the ability to set achievable goals, identify
priorities, monitor one’s own progress, and remain organized (Claessens et al., 2007) –
can lead to more effective time use and ultimately more positive outcomes, including
reduced job stress and increased job performance, in some settings (e.g. Britton and
Tesser, 1991; Jex and Elacqua, 1999). Time management and its relationship to time use
and other outcomes, however, have largely been ignored in school leadership research.
This paper helps fill this gap by examining principals’time management skills and
their associations with other outcomes using rich data from Miami-Dade County Public
Schools (M-DCPS), the nation’s fourth-largest school district. In the spring of 2011, we
conducted a survey of M-DCPS principals that included a time management inventory
used to measure four components of principals’time management skills (n¼287). We
then merged principals’scores on this inventory with several other data sources,
including administrative data on personnel and schools provided by the district,
surveys of assistant principals (APs) and teachers, and in-person observational data we
collected for a subset of M-DCPS principals over full days, also in the spring of 2011.
We use this unique data source to answer four research questions:
RQ1. How are time management skills distributed across M-DCPS principals,
particularly with respect to school and principal characteristics?
RQ2. How do time management skills predict observed principal time use?
RQ3. How are time management skills associated with principal job stress?
RQ4. To what degree, if any, are time management skills predictive of APs’and
teachers’perceptions of principal effectiveness?
The next section grounds these questions in existing research on time management
and the connections psychologists and scholars of organizational behavior have made
between time management and personal and organizational outcomes. We then
describe the data sources, construction of measures, and empirical approach before
presenting our results. The final section discusses the implications of ou r results for
school leadership practice.
Time management and its link to outcomes
High demands on one’s time are characteristic of many professions. As Britton and
Glynn (1989, p. 429) put it, “intellectually productive people usually have more things
774
JEA
53,6
To continue reading
Request your trial