Strenghtening The Empowerment of Secondary Principals through Management Theories

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The study assessed the empowerment practices of Secondary school principals in management theories and models such as Lewin's autocratic and Laissez-faire styles, Vroom-Yetton, Jago decision model leadership style, Fayol's principles of management, Mc Gregor's theory X and theory Y, transformational leadership and path-goal theory result-oriented. It also determined the extent of evidence of principals' empowerment practices in organizing, staffing, comptrolling and budgeting functions. It covered strengths and weaknesses of principals in carrying out their roles.

METHODS

Descriptive method was applied in this study. A total of 583respondents were from secondary schools in CALABARZON. The statistical tools used to treat the data were frequency, weighted mean and ranking.

RESULTS

Results revealed that the respondents very strongly agreed that the practices were guided by Vroom-Yetton-Jago decision model and transformational leadership theory, strongly agreed on Fayol's principles of management, Path-goal theory result-oriented and Mc Gregors' theory Y and moderately agreed on Lewin's autocratic style, laissez-faire style and Mc Gregor's theory X. There was significant difference between the assessments of the two groups of respondents. Principal empowerment practices were assessed as very highly evident in organizing, staffing and directing functions while moderately evident in the planning, controlling and budgeting.

DISCUSSIONS

Highest among the principals' strengths in carrying out empowerment roles were the principals' traits of being friendly and approachable while top weakness of the principals in carrying out empowerment roles was reprimanding the subordinates in front of others. Based from the findings and conclusions, the researcher proposed an empowerment training guide which when properly implemented will ensure the effective management of empowered school principals.