A STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOR OF PRINCIPALS IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN EAST TENNESSEE AND JOB SATISFACTION OF THE TEACHERS

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the leadership behaviors of public school principals in East Tennessee as perceived by the teachers and to examine any possible relationship between the perceived leadership behavior and job satisfaction of the teachers. In particular, the problem addressed by this study was which, if any, of the two critical leadership behaviors of principals, measured by the Leadership Behavior Description Questionnaire (namely, consideration and initiation of structure), contribute to job satisfaction of teachers, as measured by Brayfield's Index of Job Satisfaction.;The analytical procedures utilized to test the responses to the questionnaire were the Pearson Correlation and the T-Test. These statistics were used to test the following hypotheses at the .05 level of significance: Hypothesis 1. There is no difference between the principals' LBDQ score on consideration as perceived by the teachers and the job satisfaction score of the teachers. Hypothesis 2. There is no difference between the principals' LBDQ score on initiation of structure as perceived by the teachers and the job satisfaction score of the teachers. Hypothesis 3. There is no difference between the principals' LBDQ score of high consideration and low consideration as perceived by the teachers and the job satisfaction scores of the teachers. Hypothesis 4. There is no difference between the principals' LBDQ score of high initiation of structure and low initiation of structure as perceived by the teachers and the job satisfaction score of the teachers.;The analysis of data revealed that all four null hypotheses formulated for this study were rejected. That is, a significant relationship was found to exist between principals' scores on consideration and initiation of structure and teachers' job satisfaction scores.;The 580 teachers included in the study were randomly selected from the 12,096 teachers who are members of TEA from East Tennessee. These 580 teachers were mailed questionnaires. The questionnaire consisted of two sections. The first section was a 20-item adaptation of Andrew Halpin's Leadership Behavior Description Questionnaire (LBDQ) which included 10 items dealing with consideration and 10 items dealing with initiation of structure. The second section of the questionnaire included 18 items which were designed by Arthur Brayfield to measure job satisfaction.