Study Of The Impact Of The Leadership Behavior Of Secondary School Principals To Teachers' Professional Commitment

The leadership behavior of principal is the principal's specific behavior of instructing and influencing the activities of the staff in the process of teaching activities and educational administration. Different styles of principals' leadership behavior directly reflect the quality, ability and value tropism of the principals, and play the decisive role in the school educational qualities. As the supervisor and director of a school, the style of a principal's behavior has a important impact on the teachers who are engaged in imparting knowledge and educating, and even impact on the stability and development of ranks of teachers. While the teacher's professional commitment is the recognition teachers given to their career, as well as the will why they chose this career. Teachers who have higher professional commitment always give more identification and loyalty to their career. They would like to devote themselves to their work stably. Nevertheless, people who have lower professional commitment usually were tired to work on their position; they like to perform their duty in a perfunctory manner, moreover. They work remissly and are always ready for making career transition. During the past two or three decades, the overseas study of teacher professional commitment increasingly became abundant and mature. And the current studies also were important to this topic in nearly few years.This study made the teacher's professional commitment as its base. After referring to vast literatures and materials, this study focused on the relationship between the leadership behavior of principals and the teacher's professional commitment. We explored two aspects of problems by investigating the middle school teachers who were teaching various subjects in many regions of Shaanxi Province with the methods of questionnaire of both closed and open patterns. First, we validated whether the teacher's professional commitment had prominent difference according to different demographic variables such as gender, age, school age, education, titles, location of schools, as well as the different types of schools. Second, making the teacher's self-perceive as a start point; we explored the effects which the leadership behavior of principal personally perceived by the teachers and social support would have on the teacher's professional commitment, as well as the relationship among them. And an impacting model was established. The following are the main conclusions:1.Generally speaking ,the professional commitment of middle school teachers in china was ordinary. The different dimensions of professional commitment had a significant difference in demographic variables; 2. People-centered leadership behavior of principal not only directly affected the emotional commitment dimension of the teacher's professional commitment, but also had effect on the emotional commitment, cost commitment and normative commitment dimensions of the teaching professional commitment through the indirect effects of social support;3. Work-centered leadership behavior of principal not only directly affected the emotional commitment and cost commitment dimensions of the teaching professional commitment , but also had effect on the emotional commitment, cost commitment and normative commitment dimensions of the teaching professional commitment through the indirect effects of social support;Different styles of principals' leadership behavior had different impacts on the teacher's professional commitment. Based on empirical studies, this study came to the conclusion that it was necessary to carry out certain regularly targeted training, and that education administrative departments should supervise principals to envisage and control their own leadership behavior appropriately, and should pay attention to strengthening the school's material and cultural construction as well as the cultural construction system, which were proposals given to education administrative departments and school administrators for reference. Hoping that the leadership behavior of principals would be more scientific, democratic, humanize in the environment of China's basic education reform, and therefore some suggestions that teachers continue to engage in their teaching profession and work actively and loyally to their own the noble profession, i.e, to enhance the level of their professional commitment, would be put forward integrating with practice in order to promote the development of China's education jointly.