The Kindergarten Principal Transformational Leadership Behavior And Its Influencing Factors

The theory of transformational leadership underlines that the leader should lead his subordinates to make concerted efforts to build a vision of an organization, pay attention to and support their development, and emphasize innovative thinking to incite their needs of higher levels, so that they will work hard to realize the goals of the organizati-on.Since empirical studies both at home and abroad shows that transformational leadership behavior can significantly improve leadership performance, the application of the theory of transformational leadership to pre-school education is supposed to advance the principal’s governance and leadership, so to as promote his professionalization. In light of the foregoing, this study takes the kindergarten principal as its research object and makes a systematical research on the status quo of the object’s transformational leadership behavior. Among the factors that influence transformational leadership behavior, this paper selects the major ones-the principal’s personality traits and emotional intelligence, and examines the correaltions between the transformational leadership behavior and the personality traits, and between those behavior and the emotional intelligence, with qualitative research method as its major approach and quantitative research methods as a subsidiary one.The results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, reliability analysis and correlation analysis shows that "Questionnaire of the Principal’s Transformational Leadership Behavior ", the well-established "Big-five Personality Questionnaire " and "Emotional Intelligence Scale Questionnaire "are of highly reliability and validity. The results of independent sample T-test and factorial ANOVA shows that the principal’s transformational leadership behavior and emotional intelligence correlate with gender proportion, educational background, age, and teaching period of his kindergarten teachers. The correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis finds:firstly, the principal’s transformational leadership behavior are at a high level at large, and the charisma, vision incentive, exemplicatory virtues and individualized care rank from top to bottom in the sequence based on scores. secondly, there is no significant correlation between the principal’s neuroticism and his transformational leadership behavior; his extroversion has good predictive power for vision incentives, and has no correlation with his transformational leadership behavior and other dimensions; there is significant correlation between his extroversion and transformational leadership behavior, and between it and other sub-dimensions; agreeableness has certain predictive power for transformational leadership behavior, individualized care and exemplicatory virtues, and has no significant correlation with other sub-dimensions; the sense of responsibility can predict well transformational leadership behavior and some sub-dimensions. Thirdly, there is significant correlation between the principal’s emotional intelligence and his transformational leadership behavior, and the four sub-dimensions of the emotional intelligence have certain predictive effect on his transformational leadership behavior and its sub-dimensions. Fourthly, emotional intelligence acts as a medium between personality traits and transformational leadership behaviors.The paper concludes with the strategies aimed to enhance the principal’s transformational leadership behavior from the perspectives of common vision, chrisma, individualized care and vitues.