The role of the principal’s emotional intelligence in primary education leadership

Abstract

The development of emotional intelligence skills offers sufficient leadership qualities for advancing the organization and for achieving its objectives. In particular, the emotionally intelligent leader–principal is able to inspire and facilitate a self-conscious and organizational culture by adopting the values of understanding, trust, prospect, achievement and effectiveness and combining emotions, beliefs, vision and values in a flexible manner. In order to inquire on the above, a data-gathering process was employed in the spring of 2011, with the use of anonymous questionnaires administered to 301 educators/teachers and 36 principals who work in primary schools in Athens. The data-gathering process included the application of a questionnaire that derived key insight into the identification of key emotional intelligent and leadership factors. The data analysis process has set off 14 significant statistical factors. Ten of them were related to the principal’s emotional intelligence and four referred to leadership. The research findings have offered key insights into profiling the school principal from a leadership and emotional intelligence standpoint. Hence, such information could be rather useful in the training and development of principals, as well as for further research that could investigate the correlation between emotional intelligence and effectiveness of primary school principals.