The Relationship between Preferred Leadership Style and Personality Predisposition

Information about school districts’ talent identification procedures for identifying candidates who have the predisposition and requisite set of skills to meet the needs of individual schools is scarce. The drive of this recent study was to explore the relationship between preferred leadership style and personality type. The need for school districts to train and hire competent school leadership (SL)—i.e. principals and assistant principals, as well as the drive to improve current secondary school principal applicant assessment methods is dire. Administrators were represented from sixty-seven counties and seventy-four school districts across the State of Florida. Rural schools were excluded from the study due to their unique characteristics in comparison to Title 1 funded urban school environments. The Free and Reduced-Price Lunch (FRPL) metric and the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) School Accountability Index (SAI) report were used as the standard for categorizing high- and low-performing, high-poverty secondary schools. Out of the 1,549 secondary schools, 113 high- and low-achieving, high-poverty secondary schools were identified through FLDOE.gov public database. The Bolman and Deal Leadership Orientation Survey (B&DS) was used to assess leadership styles of school administrators and personality type of the principals were sorted using the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II (KTS-II). This recent study found that the secondary SL styles are significantly different between principals in high-achieving, high-poverty schools and principals in low-achieving, high-poverty schools and personality type aligned with specific SL frames or styles. Also, the ESTJ personality (Guardian-supervisor temperament) or ISTJ personality (Guardian-inspector temperament type) was aligned with behaviors and actions consistent with the Human Resources leadership style, subsequently the Structural leadership style.