The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of head teacher’s emotional leadership perceived by early childhood teachers on the teacher’s empowerment and organizational effectiveness in the early childhood services. The aims of this s...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of head teacher’s emotional leadership perceived by early childhood teachers on the teacher’s empowerment and organizational effectiveness in the early childhood services. The aims of this study were to explore ways to enhance the head teacher’s emotional leadership as well as increase early childhood teacher’s empowerment and lastly to improve the quality of the organization’s effectiveness while providing well organized quality education and care to children in the early childhood and education settings.
The subjects of this study were 321 early childhood teachers working in day care centers in areas of Seoul and Gyeonggi-do. Various tools for questionnaires were used in this study. Firstly, a 7-item questionnaire survey was carried out to investigate the general background of the early childhood teachers. Secondly, the Emotional Intelligence Inventory for the early childhood teachers, suggested by Cherniss and Goleman (2001) was used as a foundation for the research to identify the emotional leadership, and modified to that used by Yoon (2014) who reconstructed the questionnaire for early childhood centers. Thirdly, to examine early childhood teachers’ empowerment, the questionnaire used Kim’s (2010) style, who considered the SPES (School Participant Empowerment Scale) developed by Short & Rinehart (1992) and adapted the rationality and reliability, and Han’s (2017) style, who rectified and supplemented to make it relevant to early childhood teachers. Lastly, further study tools were used to investigate the organizational effectiveness, which was redeveloped by Lee Eun-ha (2016) who changed and supplemented Lee Jin-won’s School Efficiency Study Measurement Tool (2010), and that was used by Yoon So-yun (2017) who rectified the term, ‘children’ to ‘infant, toddlers and preschool children’.
In the study process, 30 preliminary surveys and 321 surveys were conducted. Statistical analysis was performed using the SPSS 24.0 program. The data were analyzed by descriptive statistics to determine the mean and standard deviation of emotional leadership, teacher’s empowerment, and organizational effectiveness of the head teachers recognized by early childhood teachers. Pearson’s correlation analysis was also conducted to investigate the emotional leadership, the teacher’s empowerment, and the organizational effectiveness in the early childhood centers. Finally, multiple regression analysis was conducted to investigate the impact of the head teacher's emotional leadership towards early childhood teachers’ empowerment and the organizational effectiveness.
The results of the study are as follows:
Firstly, to examine the relationship between the head teacher’s emotional leadership, teachers’ empowerment and organizational effectiveness perceived by early childhood teachers through the correlation analysis, results showed a static correlation.
Secondly, when exploring the influence that the head teacher’s emotional leadership had on early childhood teachers’ empowerment and organizational effectiveness, results showed that there was a significant impact. Therefore, this study provides data on the various influences and how they will affect the empowerment and organizational effectiveness of early childhood teachers, as well as factors that may enhance them in their day care settings.
In conclusion, it is hoped that this study will be used as basic data, and contribute and provide further understandings and support to early childhood teachers for the importance of effective operation and positive organization formation in early childhood and education settings.