Directive Versus Participative Leadership: Two Complementary Approaches to Managing School Effectiveness

Purpose: The educational literature reflects the widely shared belief that participative leadership has an overwhelming advantage over the contrasting style of directive leadership in organizational and team effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to examine the relative effect of a directive leadership approach as compared with a participative leadership approach on school-staff teams’ motivational mechanisms (empowerment and organizational commitment) and effectiveness (team in-role performance and team innovation). Method: Data, which were obtained through a survey, were collected from 140 teams selected from 140 different elementary schools in northern Israel. Results: The results of the Structural Equation Model indicated a positive relation between directive leadership and organizational commitment, as well as a positive relation between directive leadership and school-staff team in-role performance. In addition, organizational commitment served as a mediator in the directive leadership-performance relationship. With respect to participative leadership, the results indicated a positive relation between participative leadership and teachers’ empowerment, and a positive relation between participative leadership and school-staff team innovation, and empowerment served as a mediator in the participative leadership-innovation relationship. Implications: These results suggested that managing tensions between directive and participative activities, bottom-up and top-down processes, and flexibility and discipline may provide a key to teachers’ high performance.