Human Resource Management in Education: A Study of Transformational Leadership in an Era of Globalization

Abstract

For school districts to perform in an era of globalization and meet the current policy and performance demands on education, the need for transformational leadership at the building and district levels is paramount. These global and policy pressures result in a cycle of demands and responses between globalization, organizations, and human resource departments. The literature will demonstrate that HR practices that are strategic in nature provide organizations with a competitive advantage, especially in the knowledge-based economies of the 21st century. Through a mixed-methods approach, this research will study the human resource (HR) practices in a K-12 school district to provide context for the HR practices that determine the placement of principals and assistant principals into their administrative positions. It will also measure the transformational leadership level of these administrators. Examination of the qualitative data and triangulation through classical content analysis determined the district’s human resource practices as reflecting a strategic nature. The teachers in the district were administered a 5-point Likert scale survey to measure the transformational leadership traits of their principals. The district's HR practices were reviewed to identify if a statistically significant relationship existed between the district practices and the transformational leadership level of administrators hired through the employment of these practices. Significance of relationships between transformational leadership level and the hiring administration as well as between transformational leadership level and the school level the principals serve were explored through logistical regression analysis and the employment of the Mann-Whitney U test.