Huber and West (2002) delineate the following phases of leadership:
Phases
(1) The first phase is the personality or trait theory of leadership, whereby successful leaders are seen as possessing particular qualities and characteristics typical of good leaders. The personality theory focuses on great men and women leaders in history, for example: Mahatma Gandhi, Mandela, Churchill and Thatcher.
Leaders are expected to study the lives of these leaders and then attempt to emulate their behaviours and attitudes. Many of these great leaders vary tremendously and copying their behaviours is an almost impossible task.
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(2) The second phase includes examining what good leaders actually do. In this phase, certain traits are believed to relate to successful leadership. However, empirical studies have not established a definite link between particular traits, or groups of traits and effective leadership.
(3) This stage is marked by a movement for accountability in education. Starting around the mid-1980s the public became increasingly more demanding on the school system to raise standards and improve students’ academic performance.
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Along with this emerged the critical observation of school leadership and the link between leadership and school effectiveness. Adams and Kirst (1999) stated, “The ‘excellence movement’ was launched, and in its wake followed an evolution in the notion of educational accountability commensurate with the movement’s challenge to obtain better student performance”.
Leithwood, Jantzi and Steinbach (2002) refer to these initiatives as large-scale school reform. Several other initiatives were implemented as a means of providing more accountability.
Adams and Kirst state, “Policy makers, educational leaders, practitioners, and parents also continued to seek better student performance and accountability through management practices, professional standards, teacher commitment, democratic processes, and parent choice”.
School reform and accountability movements demand school principals to improve student achievement, yet little information is provided on best practices for achieving this. Numerous accountability schemes are entirely based on high-stakes standardized testing.
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However, most educators do not recognize standardized testing as the most effective ways of measuring quality of teaching and learning. Along with this movement toward greater accountability was the increasing number of research studies attempting to measure the impact of school leadership?
New terms began to emerge in literature such as: shared leadership, teacher leadership, distributed leadership and transformational leadership. “The emergence of these models indicated a broader dissatisfaction with the instructional leadership model, which many believed focused too much on the principal as the centre of expertise, power, and authority” (Hallinger, 2003).
Leithwood, Begley and Cousins (1994) discuss several questions related to the impact and influences on the practices of current school leaders on the basis of their review of studies conducted from 1974 to 1988. Based on such studies, they conclude that current school-leaders are capable of having a significant influence on the basic skills’ achievement of students”.
(4) By 1990, researchers shifted their attention to leadership models that were “more consistent with evolving trends in educational reform such as empowerment, shared leadership, and organizational learning (Hallinger, 2003).
These are ‘second order’ changes (Leithwood et al., 1994) as they are aimed chiefly at changing the organization’s normative structure”. Transformational leadership is the primary model reflecting the aforementioned characteristics.