Principals' Transformational Leadership Behaviours in Public Secondary Schools in the State of Kuwait: A Comparison between Male and Female Principals

The paper reports an empirical study investigating transformational leadership practices among principals in public secondary schools in the State of Kuwait, as perceived by secondary-school teachers. This research adopted the taxonomy of the transformational leadership paradigm and the conceptual model for school restructuring proposed by Leithwood (1994) and Janie and Leithwood (1995). The respondents consisted of 682 teachers from 118 public secondary schools in six educational regions in Kuwait. The second-order confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the core transformational leadership dimensions of principals are: (I) cultivating extensively shared visions; (ii) constructing consensus about school goals and priorities; (iii) having high performance expectations; (iii) modelling behaviours; (iv) providing personal support to teachers and school staff; (v) providing intellectual stimulation; (vi) consolidating a school culture; and (vii) constructing a collaborative school structure. Such finding on transformational leadership behaviours in the Kuwaiti school context are highly consistent with the original model proposed by Leithwood (1994) and Janie and Leithwood (1995). In addition, the result on the measurement invariance showed that there was not statistical difference between male and female principals' transformational leadership model.