Validation of the School Principals’ Servant Leadership Behaviors Scale with a population from the United States

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to validate the results of Ekinci’s original research study conducted to the School Principals’ Servant Leadership Behaviors Scale (SPSLBS), a scale measuring the servant leadership behaviors of school principals (2015). Ekinci’s scale was developed for use in Turkey and had not been validated for use in the United States. This instrument was selected due to the importance of having a method of assessing principal leadership that is based on the perceptions of their teachers and because no other servant leadership scale has been developed to specifically looks at servant leadership within the educational setting. Elementary and middle school teachers from participating New York State and Pennsylvania schools were the primary sampling unit and data was collected by administering the SPSLBS. Results were promising as the multidimensional structure of the SPSLBS was able to be replicated with a sample from the United States using Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The instrument was found to be a reliable measure with satisfactory convergent and discriminant validity. Similar to the original study, the factors correlated well enough to be viewed as constructs measuring the overall servant leadership behavior of school principals, but differently enough to demonstrate that the scale is made up of individual factors and is not just a unidimensional scale. Overall, the goodness-of-fit of the model was adequate. Additional analyses identified no significant difference between the teachers’ perceptions regarding their school principals’ servant leadership behaviors based on their gender, which differed from the original study. However, teacher perceptions did differ significantly according to their length of employment with their current principal, but did not follow this same pattern as in the original study. The current study initiated the process of strengthening the adaptability and usefulness of the SPSLBS within a broader cultural and geographical context.