Generative leadership: profile of effective 21st century secondary principals

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2009
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Abstract
An instrumental qualitative approach was used in this inquiry into the concerns of 21st century secondary school principals who operate within the context of accelerating technological growth, globalization, multiculturalism, political change, education reform, and publicly problematized student underachievement. The research focused on the combination of intelligent roles that effective principals enact to respond to the relentlessly accelerating and intensifying changes and demands that characterize their environment. Research data were collected by means of structured open-ended interviews with six effective urban secondary school principals, in Ontario, Canada. The constant comparison method was used to analyze and compare participants' description of their leadership decision-making and interacting, and to generate archetypal concepts that interpret and explain their ongoing resolving behaviour. The resulting core concept characterizes effective 21st century secondary school leadership as a generative process. Generative leadership entails the enacting of conservative, integrative, adaptive, and transformative intelligent roles in response to the effects of complexity and change. As well, the findings suggest that the prevailing economic and political context, coupled with the technology-mediated transparency and immediacy of demands, generates a moral dilemma for secondary school principals, as it prescribes the ethics and methods of the private sector, which yield expedient, not wholly sustainable improvements. Sustainable improvements require the authenticating, mutually-actualizing and transcendental ethics of moral, servant or transforming leadership. As characterized by the principals in this study, generative leadership represents a philosophy, methodology, praxis, and profile of effective secondary school leadership during times of accelerated complexity and change.
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Bibliography: p. 306-318
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Citation
Smith, A. J. (2009). Generative leadership: profile of effective 21st century secondary principals (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/2540
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