Leadership Tensions and Dilemmas

Results from the Tasmanian Successful School Principal Project (SSPP) survey concur with the four major leadership tensions and dilemmas identified in a background literature review. These tensions and dilemmas relate to internal/external control, ethic of care/responsibility, and an emphasis on professional/personal as well as leadership/management. The results also offer new insights. These insights include differences in the effects of the tensions and dilemmas based on principal qualifications, experience and gender, school size, socio-economic status (SES) and organisational capacity, and student social and literacy/numeracy success adjusted for school SES. A recent review of research concerning quality teaching and quality leading in Australian schools has highlighted a need to look at ways in which successful school leaders manage dilemmas and tensions that arise in schools (Zammit et al., 2007, p. 27). This article aims to review some representative literature in the area and provide results from the Tasmanian Successful School Principals Project (SSPP) project, which includes a set of survey items relating to leadership tensions and dilemmas. Background Literature Research studies from three countries, UK, Canada and Australia, focussed on dilemmas faced by school principals. In the UK, Day et al. (2001) saw dilemmas for principals choosing between courses of action which are to a greater or lesser extent mutually exclusive. Two of the dilemmas identified were development or dismissal, that is what to do with a teacher who is teaching badly and does not seem to be improving despite participation in staff development activities, and the dilemma of subcontracting or mediation, reflecting the position of principals who are caught between two sets of imperatives for changes – internal and external whereby the external impetus for change was ‘imposed’ by central government and its agencies, and the internal imperatives comprising a complex mixture of school-based factors. The notion of a leadership dilemma occurs when principals can no longer justify externally imposed changes that are incongruent with the needs of their school. The role of mediator allows the principal space in which to integrate the externally imposed change, whereas the role of subcontractor implies a loss of control, autonomy and decisionmaking, as key decisions are made elsewhere. The dilemma of development or dismissal relates to the internal decision-making of leaders as they struggle to formulate appropriate courses of action. Day et al. (2001) reported UK research from case studies that involved some two hundred individual and group interviews with four hundred participants – principals, teachers, parents, governors and students. The data from the study highlighted a number of tensions and dilemmas that principals experienced and managed as part of their work, and specific sets of pressures within certain contexts namely: leadership versus management, development versus maintenance, and internal versus external change. Additional tensions identified from the case study included autocracy versus autonomy, personal time versus professional tasks, personal versus institutional imperatives, and leadership in small versus large schools. Further, principals experienced difficulty in managing responses to demands from inside the schools and demands from outside the schools. From Canada, Castle and Mitchell (2001) claim that school leaders can at least partly offset the tension between change and stability by actively building organisational capacity for school improvement. Twelve elementary school principals from two boards of education in southern Ontario participated in a study aimed at uncovering what these principals did on a daily basis. Qualitative data were collected over twelve months through two semi-structured interviews and written narratives, and extended observations of each principal in his/her work environment, as well as two focus sessions that brought participants together in specific groups. Four key tensions that faced principals identified by Castle and Mitchell were managerial demands versus instructional leadership, responsibility versus authority, change versus stability, and relationship-building versus control of personal work environment. Management tensions pulled principals away from teachers, students, and instruction, whereas instructional leadership pulled them away from procedures, organisation and logistics. Principals perceived that they were endowed with responsibilities for which they did not have any corresponding authority, for example, the performance of students on provincial standardised tests. Further, principals felt that they had to cope with a multitude of change initiatives coming from the Ministry of Education, and occasionally from the school board, in the context of demands on the principal’s work environment through an open-door policy. Management tensions existed, in part, because principals in the study felt a compelling need to operate on both sides of the dilemma – to manage and lead, to be responsible and autonomous, to handle change and maintain stability, and to build relationships and control their personal work space. Whenever tensions arise, the principals in the study responded according to their own beliefs, preferences and priorities. Results from Australian research by Wildy (1999), involving unstructured in-depth interviews with principals engaged in a period of restructuring of schools in Western Australia, indicated that pressures from the contradictions of restructuring could be conceptualised as three dilemmas the accountability dilemma, the autonomy dilemma, and the efficiency dilemma. Wildy describes factors confronting principals as they deal with dilemmas in terms of trust, autonomy, and efficiency. Wildy found that principals are required to operate within two sets of constraints: one is to set up and use participatory decision-making structures and the other is to work to defend centrally defined policies. However, when faced with choices between accountability and participation, principals chose accountability; when faced with autonomy or collaboration, they chose autonomy and likewise, efficiency took precedence over participation. Wildy (1999) makes the point that principals aim to turn chaos into order within a framework of certainty, efficiency, and expediency, and therefore it is not surprising that principals are challenged by the untidiness of shared decisionmaking. For principals the problem of participation is that the collaborative arrangements they establish seem to be based more on the ethic of responsibility than on the ethic of care, whereas the ethics of care is based on participation. Tensions and dilemmas related to competing value systems were identified in other Australian schools (Duignan, 2003; Wildy and Louden, 2000.) An analysis of policy documents on school-based management by Lingard et al. (2002) demonstrated that tensions between centralised and decentralised control were increased with school-based management, as well as tension between concepts of market efficiency and equity/social justice. The research of Cranston et al. (2003), on the changing roles of secondary school principals in Australia and New Zealand, found a major tension between the requirements of leadership versus management. Tensions and/or dilemmas faced by a principal may arise due to external pressures placed on the school by an employing authority or because of a principal’s perceived role conflict between being an educational leader and being a manager of supporting services within the school. Tensions and dilemmas may also arise following a concern about the quality of teaching staff and determining appropriate strategies for development and/or dismissal, or when requirements for change impact on the notion of stability within the school. Cranston et al. (2006) Queensland research identified a number of additional dilemmas for school leaders which typically were about welfare, performance and behaviours both of staff and students. Tensions and dilemmas may occur as principals relinquish some of their autonomy and control in favour of building commitment and relationships through collaboration and, similarly, when principals are required to implement, or have the responsibility for implementing, policy/decisions that they have had no say in the need for, or the formation of, that policy. Boris-Schacter and Langer (2006) expressed these competing dilemmas as three pairs of activity categories that they identified as ‘principal tensions’ namely: Instruction and management, Work and personal lives, and Societal/community expectations and individual priorities. For example, principals reported that when they wanted to go into classrooms they had to complete paper-work; when they wanted to stay in school they missed the evening meal at home; when the community wanted them to respond immediately, they wanted to gather information and carefully consider options. In summary, the background literature has identified four major leadership tensions and dilemmas: Control and change – internal/decentralised, autonomous versus external/centralised Ethic – of care (participation/collaboration/equity) versus of responsibility (accountability/efficiency); Major imperative – professional/instructional versus personal; Major function – instructional/development/leadership versus management/ maintenance. The focus of this paper now turns to an exploration of data derived from Tasmanian principals concerning their perceptions of the tensions and dilemmas they face as school leaders.