Leadership-style and Personality-attributes Relationship among Leaders of two American Curriculum Private Schools in Dubai

Abstract

School leaders’ interaction with stakeholders is a dynamic process with interdependent factors, where leaders provide guidance to achieve best outcomes. Studying leadership-style and personality-attributes association is the focus of this study, guided by three research questions. The first question investigated the leadership-styles of leaders within the two American curricula private school in Dubai. The second and third questions examined and explored the degree of laissez-faire, transactional and transformational leadership-styles relationship with the Big Five personality-attributes within the schools. A mixed method approach consisted of a quantitative phase, involved the use of the Multi-Factor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ:6S- Self) to measure the leadership-styles, and the use of the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) to look at personality-attributes, while qualitative phase triangulated the data collected by exploring how the personality-attributes contribute to leadership-style through semi-structured interviews. The findings indicated that transactional and transformational leadership-styles had high positive correlation and were moderately and highly represented among two school leaders, while laissez-faire was low and moderately represented. The relationship between degree of leadership-styles and the magnitude of the personality-attributes varied, transformational leadership was positively correlated to openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, while no significant correlation existed with transformational leadership, extroversion, and emotional-stability. Transactional leadership-style had no significant association with all attributes. Laissez-faire was negatively associated with transactional, transformational leadership and personality-attributes similar. The interviews confirmed and triangulated the strength of the magnitude of transformational leadership-style exhibited in both schools and the related personality-attributes.