Leadership Practices of Secondary School Principals: A Cross-national Comparison of Thailand U.S. Principals

Abstract

This study has sought to determine if significant differences were existed between the Leadership practices of Thai and U.S. principals. The leadership practices of principals were measured using Kouzes’and Posner's Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI). This measured leadership practices in five distinct areas such as: practice modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act and encouraging the heart. The three selected demographic variables namely gender, age and education attainments were also considered.The population of the study consisted of school's principal and observer in Thailand and the U.S. The research selected a random sampling through several steps (1) Multistage Random Sampling (2) Cluster Multistage Sampling (3) Simple random sampling. Sorted by number of schools from small to large sample groups, the number of sample – respondents coming from the US was 346 whilst 395 for Thailand. Data were analyzed by using Mean, S.D and ANOVA. There were significant differences between the leadership practices of Thai and U.S. principals in terms of leadership practice by practice modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act and encouraging the heart at a significant level of .05. Also, significant differences at a significant statistic level of .05 were also observed with regards to the selected demographic variables.