Conference Agenda

Schools are organizations that convey cultural values, equip and train individuals for society, and aim to empower communities within a framework of social justice and equality (Moos et al., 2008). School principals play important roles in enabling these educational organizations to achieve their goals and maintain their existence effectively (Belenkuyu et al., 2020). However, school principals with different personal characteristics use unique methods to fulfill their managerial duties (Leithwood et al., 2008). In this regard, the way school principals perform their duties allows for the formation of different typological characteristics (Belenkuyu et al., 2020). Consequently, it is crucial to refer to the theoretical frameworks that clarify personality traits to understand the differences in school principals' leadership and managerial practices.
The five-factor model of personality is one of the most prominent theories in personality studies (Çalık et al., 2018). Despite its long history, this model is relatively new and examines personality in terms of five basic dimensions, drawing on observations rather than theory (Aşkar & Çınkır, 2021). The five-factor model of personality comprises extraversion, which reflects individuals’ assertiveness and energy in social interactions; agreeableness, which denotes a tendency toward cooperation and interpersonal harmony; conscientiousness, which refers to being organized, disciplined, and responsible; neuroticism, which indicates resilience to negative emotional experiences; and openness to experience, which represents receptiveness to cognitive and cultural innovation. Collectively, these dimensions provide a comprehensive and holistic explanation of personality (Viswesvaran & Ones, 2003).
A leadership typology encompassing eight models developed by Bush and Glover (2014), based on the leadership-related studies of Leithwood, Jantzi, and Steinbach (1999), was used as the theoretical framework in this study, along with the five-factor personality theory. The models included in this typology are instructional leadership, managerial leadership, transformational leadership, moral and authentic leadership, distributed leadership, teacher leadership, systems leadership, and contingent leadership.

The present study is grounded in two complementary theoretical frameworks: the Five-Factor Personality Theory and the leadership typology proposed by Bush and Glover (2014). The Five-Factor Personality Theory was selected because it provides a comprehensive and empirically supported framework for explaining individual differences in leadership behaviors. The model includes extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience, all of which are associated with interpersonal interaction, decision-making, emotional regulation, and organizational behavior (Viswesvaran & Ones, 2003).

Bush and Glover’s (2014) leadership typology was specifically chosen because it offers a multidimensional understanding of educational leadership that reflects both organizational and contextual dimensions of school administration. Unlike leadership models that focus solely on instructional effectiveness or managerial efficiency, this typology incorporates instructional, managerial, transformational, moral/authentic, distributed, teacher, systems, and contingent leadership. These approaches collectively allow for a broader interpretation of school leadership practices and make it possible to examine how personality traits are reflected in different leadership orientations. The integration of these two frameworks provides a stronger analytical basis for understanding how principals’ personality traits shape their management styles and leadership practices. In this sense, leadership is considered not only as a behavioral process but also as a phenomenon influenced by individual dispositions and contextual conditions. For this reason, this study sought to answer the following research question:
“What are the principal typologies based on school principals’ different personality traits, and how are these typologies reflected in management practices?”

Today, schools are subject of complex demands, both externally and internally. Each individual nation-state requires the schools to implement new standards, assessments or resources, aiming to hold them accountable for keeping up with the rapid changes happening in the society. The recent studies highlight that the systems of external reliability had limited success to produce the expected results, while the effective systems have focused on creating internal accountability by building the individual and collective capacity of educators (Fullan, Ricon-Gallordo and Hargreaves, 2015; Darling-Hammond, Heyer and Gardener, 2017, Azorin & Fullan, 2022, Eisenschmidt & Vanari 2025). In achieving this, the principals play a pivotal role through four leadership practices identified as effective: setting directions, building relationships and developing people, redesigning the organisation to support desired practices and improving the instructional program (Leithwood, Harris & Hopkins, 2019).

In developing countries such as Kosovo, challenges reported in the education system also reflect the need for leadership practices that would support the school’s development and results. More specifically, the European Commission report for Kosovo recognises that the country has made some efforts, but still struggles to implement the Education Strategy 2022 – 2026. The results of international tests PISA (2022) and PIRLS (2021) are below the average of international results. It should be mentioned that in the last two decades, the Kosovo efforts to improve the schools’ results were mainly focused on new curricula and teachers’ development, but less on the role that principals can have. In fact, there have been some attempts to define further the leadership role by enacting few administrative instructions within the last five years (UA 151/2020, UA 106/2020), but there is still no sustainable professional development policy for school principals. In public discourse, the limited role of principals in school performance is often attributed to the significant influence that the municipal authorities exert over principals (Lortie, 2009). The principals themself acknowledge that the challenges present in their school context, oblige them to spend more time on administrative responsibilities which limits their engagement in their leadership functions.

In this context, and based on the theoretical framework of the four main leadership functions (Louis et al, 2010), the purpose of this study is to examine principals’ self-reported application of the four leadership functions and to analyse how these functions relate to efforts to improve teaching and learning. The research questions include: (1) to what extent do principals report applying each of the four leadership functions? (2) which leadership function is reported as most and least frequently applied? (3) are there statistically significant differences between the demographic variables/school characteristics and principals’ attitudes toward the leadership? and (4) What is the relationship between the four leadership dimensions as reported by principals?

There is growing national research evidence that successful principals work with teachers and others to build shared leadership capacity for school success defined by academic learning outcomes, student wellbeing, and quality of life (e.g. Authors, 2022; Leithwood and Reihl, 2005; Spillane, 2004). International studies of successful schools also indicate the importance of building team leadership capacity for school improvement with practices that include a positive school climate, organizational learning, and culturally responsive practices (Authors, 2026; Author, 2013; Day, Jacobson and Johansson, 2011; Johnson, Moller, Pashiardis, Vedoy and Savvides, 2011a). Thus, a growing number of national and international leadership studies indicate the importance of shared leadership capacity that contribute to school development, and student learning. In particular, we are interested in how leadership teams develop capacity for implementation of curriculum standards across their schools, and thus, avoid the disruption of official turnaround status. In Arizona, schools that are designated as “turnaround” must replace the principal and half of the teaching staff. In this paper, we provide a case example of how a principal engaged in a school development project learned to build leadership team capacity to foster a positive school culture and solve problems of practice that contribute to improved academic learning outcomes, student wellbeing, and quality of life in a high-needs Southern Arizona district near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Formal leadership development programs for improving persistently underperforming schools emerged in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act and more recent evidence-based policies, including the Virginia School Turnaround Specialist Program (STSP), the Mass Insight and Research Institute model based in New York, and the Chicago Reconstitution Effort. For example, the Virginia STSP program provided 95 principals with business strategies and individual coaching in more than 82 school districts in numerous states, including Pennsylvania, Illinois, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Ohio, and the Dakotas. The project features evidence-based strategies and standardized program elements for pedagogy and assessment. The project did not incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy or the use of data as a source of reflection. Chicago’s Academy for Urban School Leadership developed a framework to improve student achievement in participating schools, focusing on school culture, parent engagement, goal setting, shared responsibility, rigorous K–12 curriculum, aligned assessments, and personalized instruction. The Chicago project did not explicitly attend to increasingly student diversity or relevant pedagogy. As we reviewed these models, we also noted that leadership was considered an individual construct without attention to leadership teams and distributed leadership.

In this paper, we discuss the strengths and limitations of literature connecting research and school development and the ways in which it informed our school development process for building team leadership capacity to solve problems of practice and improve school culture, student academic learning outcomes, student wellbeing and quality of life for increasingly diverse students. We then share an example of a school principal who participated in our school development process grounded in an international study of successful school principalship

(ISSPP) as well as our school development process for school leadership teams with two institutes (1.5 day and 3 days) each year, school visits, and virtual network meetings. Through the school development process, the principal developed her leadership team, worked with and through the team to identify a problem of practice, implement a solution on a small scale, collect and assess data related to the problem, and plan for continuous improvement. Through the principal’s leadership and growth in the school development process, the school improved academic outcomes to a point where it was selected for an international study of successful principals’ leadership contributions to school success (ISSPP).