Leadership Actions-Oriented Behavioral Style to Accommodate Change and Development in Schools

Abstract

This study explores the leadership actions-oriented behavior of school principals in Finland. Actions-orientated behavior enables the leader to appropriately articulate relations and task orientation to meet the immediate contextual demands and to accommodate followership toward change and development. The leadership actions-orientated behavior of Finnish school principals were studied in three schools. In-depth interviews with school actors (principals, vice principals, teachers, special educators, and nonteaching staff) were conducted to triangulate the analyzed data. It was found that leadership actions-oriented behavior enabled school leaders to articulate appropriate behavioral patterns to generate motivation and commitment. The results suggest that actions orientations toward high-on relations enabled leaders to achieve leadership success, while actions orientations toward high-on task enabled leadership effectiveness. Actions-oriented behavior toward high-on task enables leadership flexibility with greater leadership elasticity. The results suggest that school actors anticipated a relational approach, whose actions orientations were high-on task. The results also suggest that relations-oriented behavior is rationally applied by school leaders who have remained in the organization for a longer time to strengthen the systematic approach. It was found that leaders’ actions orientation with high-on task were more effective, while leadership actions orientation with high-on relations generated social harmony. The results suggest that leadership actions-oriented behavioral flexibility and mobility can be maintained by articulating high relations to low relations and high task to low task, not necessarily from task to relations or relations to task alone. In doing so, a leader’s personality is prevented from distortions and behavior dysfunction.