School principals’ systems thinking: antecedents and consequences
| Published date | 08 April 2019 |
| Pages | 167-184 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-08-2018-0144 |
| Date | 08 April 2019 |
| Author | Pascale Benoliel,Haim Shaked,Nechama Nadav,Chen Schechter |
| Subject Matter | Education,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy,Educational administration,Leadership in education |
School principals’systems
thinking: antecedents
and consequences
Pascale Benoliel
School of Education, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
Haim Shaked
Hemdat Hadarom College of Education, Netivot, Israel, and
Nechama Nadav and Chen Schechter
School of Education, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
Abstract
Purpose –Today’s educational complexities require principals to adopt a more systemic perspective
toward school management. Although research has emphasized the benefits associated with the
holistic perspective of systems thinking, research in the educational field has been limited. The
purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating role of principals’systems thinking (PST) in
the relationships between instructional leadership (IL) and subject coordinators’organizational commitment
and job satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach –Data were collected by surveying a sample of 226 subject coordinators
from different elementary schools randomly chosen in Israel. Subject coordinators completed questionnaires
on their PST competencies, their principals’IL, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Structural
equation modeling was used to test the research hypotheses.
Findings –The results confirmed the main hypotheses: PST did facilitate subject coordinators’
organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Findings also showed that PST mediated the relationship
between IL and subject coordinators’organizational commitment and job satisfaction.
Originality/value –By integrating research from both educational and non-educational literature, this
study contributes to deepen our understanding regarding the antecedents and consequences of the PST as
perceived by their subject coordinators, providing a broader leadership framework on their functions in
today’s complex school systems.
Keywords Principals, System thinking, Job satisfaction, Organizational commitment, Subject coordinators
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
A school is an inherently complex organization, involving a vast number of interacting
functions, people and purposes (Crick et al., 2017). Practitioners and researchers alike agree
that recent years have brought even more challenging intricacies to school leadership
(Fullan, 2014; Saiti, 2015). Therefore, current principals facing today’s educational
complexities may benefit from the holistic perspective of systems thinking (ST), which
emphasizes understanding the system as a whole before studying its parts, while
simultaneously considering an array of influencing factors (Shaked and Schechter, 2017).
Research showed that principals’systems thinking (PST) may yield a number of positive
effects including improved school and teacher outcomes (Pang and Pisapia, 2012).
Yet, ST has been hardly studied in the educational leadership field in relation to faculty
members’job attitudes (Bui and Baruch, 2012).
Over the past several decades, the single-leader model has been progressively eroding as the
requirements of the job have come to exceed the capacity of a single individual (Day et al., 2016).
Principals have increasingly come to rely for support on school middle-leaders such as
department heads, grade-level coordinators and subject coordinators (Bush and Glover, 2014).
Middle-leaders constitute the “intermediate layer”in the school’s organizational structure,
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 57 No. 2, 2019
pp. 167-184
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-08-2018-0144
Received 7 August 2018
Revised 13 December 2018
27 January 2019
Accepted 29 January 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
167
School
principals’
systems
thinking
located between the senior leadership and the classroom teachers (Gurr and Drysdale, 2013).
Specifically, scholars have shown that subject coordinators are critical to a school’s successful
functioning in complex situations (Day et al., 2016). Researchers found that the subject
coordinator role had a significant influence on school performance and student results
(Leithwood, 2016). Operating in an environment of constant and extensive external demands
and reforms, subject coordinators are the motivating force driving for change. Among other
important roles, they coordinate teachers’pedagogical tasks, thereby contributing toward
academic improvement (Somech and Naamneh, 2019). Research indicates that one fundamental
factor that may have a substantial impact on subject coordinators’attitudes toward their work
and workplace is the principal’s leadership (Bush and Glover, 2014). Accordingly, this study
aimed to investigate the consequences of PST on their subject coordinators’job attitudes.
According to Shaked et al.’s (2018) conceptualization, PST includes four major
competencies through which principals apply ST in their schools –first, evaluating
significance refers to the principal’s ability to envision elements of school life according to
their significance for the entire system. Second, openness to a variety of opinions refers to
the principal’s willingness to listen to diverse people and ideas, which derives from the
principal’s self-awareness of his/her own limitations and readiness to learn from others.
Third, leading wholes refers to principal’s holistic perspective, oriented toward seeing the
big picture and not only its individual parts. Fourth, adopting a multidimensional view
refers to the principal’s contemplation of several aspects of a given issue simultaneously,
by attributing that issue’s emergence and existence to a wide range of potential sources.
Their conceptualization of ST draws upon Bertalanffy’s (1968) claim that the only
way to fully understand why a phenomenon arises and persists is to understand its
parts in relation to the whole. This approach reflects the open system approach:
every phenomenon must be viewed from the perspective of the whole system to which it
belongs as well as its subsystems and the relationships between its various components
(Hammond, 2005).
Following Shaked et al.’s (2018) conceptualization of PST, the present study proposed
to investigate the antecedents and consequences of PST as perceived by their subject
coordinators. Specifically, the study model posited that PST activiti es would mediate th e
relationships between principals’instructional leadership (IL) and subject coordinators’
organizational commitment and job satisfaction (please see Figure 1). Such investigation is
important because organizational commitment and job satisfaction are related to school
effectiveness and a positive and healthy school work environment (Bogler and Nir, 2015;
Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2017). IL was selected as an antecedent of PST because it involves
not only a wide range of activities aiming at improving teaching and learning and
garnering school-wide commitment (Hallinger and Wang, 2015) but also due to its
Control variables
Principal Characteristics
Education, School tenure
School Characteristic
School size
Principals’
Systems
Thinking
Subject coordinators’
Organizational
Commitment
Principals’
Instructional
Leadership
Subject coordinators’
Job Satisfaction
Figure 1.
Proposed research
model: principals’
systems thinking
mediates the relations
between principals’
instructional
leadership and subject
coordinators’job
satisfaction and
organizational
commitment
168
JEA
57,2
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