Supporting the Policy Implementation Performance of Public Primary School Leaders in Malaysia: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) of Public Leadership

Abstract

Policy implementation requires the act of translating the goals and objectives of policy into actions. Policy implementation is a difficult process because how policy actors and implementers act on the policy on a large scale may decide whether it succeeds or fails. There is a growing recognition that policies do not succeed or fail on their own, but instead due to a lack of leadership qualities in policy implementation. The study aims to develop and validate the instrument for measuring the public leadership construct of school leaders in Malaysia. The instrument was adapted from the previous study and modified to suit the current study. The study also added ten new items to complement the original instrument of public leadership initiated by Tummers and Knies (2016). The target population is school leaders in the national-type primary schools in Malaysia. A simple random sampling method was utilized to select a random sample of 381 participants from the sampling frame of eligible school leaders in the country. Content validity and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted on the instrument before the confirmatory factor analysis. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) procedure confirmed the existence of four sub-constructs of the public leadership construct that are accountability leadership, rule-following/lawfulness leadership, political loyal leadership, and network governance leadership. The CFA process has deleted four items due to poor factor loading (less than 0.6). The fitness indexes for all fit categories have achieved the required level of a model fit. Meanwhile, the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) and Composite Reliability (CR), which reflect the convergent validity and construct reliability, respectively, have also achieved the required level of a model fit. Hence, the revised instrument for measuring the public leadership construct of school leaders in Malaysia is valid and reliable for use to determine the policy implementation performance of the public primary school leaders in Malaysia.