Exploring the effects of excellent principals' authentic leadership on schools’ collaborative culture in Malaysia

Abstract

The authentic leadership practice of educational leaders has lately gained attention in the leadership literature. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a quantitative cross-sectional study to determine its impact on Malaysian school culture. Consequently, this study will look at how each of the four elements—self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and relational transparency—of authentic leadership practices by secondary school principals directly effects school culture. This research employing a survey approach that combines the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) and the School Culture Survey (SCS) questionnaires. This survey involved 437 respondents from Malaysian secondary schools. The Structural Equation Model (SEM) was used to examine the study's findings. In line with the study's findings, there is a positive direct effect between self-awareness and relational transparency on school culture. On the other hand, internalized moral perspective and balanced processing have no direct effect on school culture. Finally, the proposed model of this study of school's collaborative culture has 0.34 or 34% of total variance explained by the constructs of self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and relational transparency of excellent principals' practice. Overall, the outcomes of this study are aimed at providing information regarding authentic leadership styles at school level.