Finnish Urban School Teacher's Evaluations on Principals Emotional Leadership Competencies

This paper presents a 51 -item self-rating Likert-scale Emotional Leadership Questionnaire (ELQ) that operationalises Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee's (2002) four domains of Emotional Intelligence (EI) with eighteen characteristics. The sample consists of 124 Finnish teachers from four comprehensive and two upper secondary schools. The construct validity of the ELQ was tested with following two stages: (1) Comparison of the mean values and standard deviations of the 51 ELQ items measuring teachers' evaluations on their principals Emotional Leadership (EL) and (2) examination of the variable structure of ELQ to test it against the theoretical EI -model. Results showed that school principals were able to keep disruptive emotions and impulses under control; they were able to adapt to new challenges and see the upside in the events. The theoretical structure of EI was present at least in component level in this domain. Further, the visual inspection of the Bayesian dependency network showed that all four EL domains were present in the model derived from the empirical sample. In this paper, we use the term Emotional Leadership (EL) to describe school principals' EI capabilities as leaders. We study with an empirical sample (N = 124) how Finnish schoolteachers evaluate their principals EL competencies. This paper focuses on teachers responses, leaving out other school personnel (for example, cleaners), students and their parents. The paper is organised as follows: First, we discuss the central concepts of EI research body. Second, we present an Emotional Leadership Questionnaire (ELQ) that operationalises four domains of EI (Goleman, Boyazis & McKee, 2002; Nokelainen & Ruohotie, 2005; 2006). Third, we study with an empirical sample of 124 Finnish comprehensive (n = 84) and upper secondary (n = 40) school teachers the construct validity of the ELQ with following two stages: (1) Comparison of the mean values and standard deviations of the 51 ELQ items measuring teachers' evaluations on their principals EL, and (2) examination of the variable structure of ELQ to test it against the theoretical EI -model. Finally, we conclude the results, discuss the weak point of this study and suggest guidelines for the future study.