Understanding the relationship between school leaders’ social and emotional competence and their transformational leadership

Abstract

This study examined the possible relationship between emotional competence and transformational leadership in K-12 school leaders as a function of self–other agreement. The study found that, for those school leaders whose self-assessment of their leadership agreed with that of their subordinates, the self-ratings of emotional competence were strongly and significantly correlated with the self-ratings of transformational leadership. However, the correlations between emotional competence and leadership self-ratings were not significant for those school leaders who either over- or under-estimated their transformational leadership. In contrast, the correlations of others’ ratings of the leaders’ emotional competence and transformational leadership were equally strong and significant for all leaders. Furthermore, this study demonstrated that those leaders who agreed with their subordinates in the assessment of their transformational leadership also agreed with their subordinates in the rating their social and emotional competence, whereas leaders who over-estimated their transformational leadership were likely to rate their emotional competence higher than were their subordinates. These identified relationships have potential implications for professional development programming for school leaders and for furthering establishing the degree to which development of emotional competence promotes the development of transformational leadership.