Principals’ Leadership Styles and Strategies Employed to Motivate Teachers in Ronaki Hawler Educational Institutions, Erbil, Iraq

Abstract

 Effective management is one of the determining factors that play a critical role in teacher motivation. It is also the main factor behind a successful educational institution. Moreover, effective management is necessary to motivate people into action and propel an institution to reach its established objectives. In an educational institution, where managerial structure fails to function well, teachers obviously lose their motivation to teach as well as their commitment to the organization. Therefore, administrators’ leadership styles can affect teacher motivation which will eventually affect learners’ performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the administrators’ leadership styles, their awareness of teacher motivation peculiarities and strategies they use to motivate the teaching staff at Ronaki Educational Institutions in Erbil, Iraq. It further aims to investigate what makes an effective administrator. To achieve the research goal, the study firstly uses the theoretical analysis of the scientific and methodological literature on the research problem and makes use of a semi-structured interview with Ronaki Hawler Educational Institutions’ administrators. In the interview with 24 administrators, the information on organizational practices and their frequencies, employed by administrators, was obtained. It included elements such as; whether/how often advancement opportunities, promotion, autonomy, bonuses were granted to the teaching staff, what sort of responsibility they possessed, how their recognition as teachers was expressed, and how secure they felt their jobs were. The findings were analyzed and discussed in the discussion part of this research study.