Next Steps: Adaptation and Use of an Established Organizational Model in Training Principals

Abstract

Today's school principals are confronted with increasing and often conflicting demands for effective and accountable performance. Many of those demands center on essentially impersonal managerial tasks such as strategic planning, documentation and evaluation, while others focus on the humanistic imperatives of showing concern for others, nurturing staff talents and empowering faculty. The author has found the Getzels-Guba model of organizational social system functioning (Getzels and Guba, 1957; Getzels, 1958) to be a practical conceptual base for adaptation as a teaching tool to be used with principalship trainees in addressing such conflicting demands. The Getzels-Guba model as adapted by this writer has proven effective as an analytical aid used by graduate students in understanding the practical dynamics of the school leadership functions of the principal. The school is viewed as a social system, the functioning of which results in observable organizational behavior. The model is divided into an impersonal nomothetic dimension comprising the institution, role and expectation, and a highly personal idiographic dimension consisting of the parallel elements of the individual, his/her personality and his/her operative need-disposition. Simultaneous activity along both dimensions results in observable behavior with which the principal must deal. Although Getzels focused on the idio-graphic/nomothetic dynamics involved as existing within the individual, the author of this article has expanded the basic concept to include such interaction both within the individual and between individuals. Three types of possible conflict arising from the internal dynamics of the model were identified by Getzels: role conflict, personality conflict, and role-personality conflict. Each, as expanded and adapted by the present writer, is discussed in reference to its applicability to principalship training. The point is emphasized to students that by facilitating effective interface of the nomothetic and idiographic dimensions of the school social system, the principal can minimize the negative effects of conflict and help release the creative energy needed to attain organizational effectiveness. Emphasis is placed on experiences in using this adapted model with principalship trainees, their reactions to its applicability, and practical suggestions to facilitate its use as an aid in teaching. The author concludes by advising professors of educational administration to consider rational expansion and adaptation of existing models, theories and paradigms essential to their task of linking theory with practice.