Background information on effects of leadership styles on job satisfaction
According to the International Schools Consultancy, international schools cater largely to
pupils who are not residents of the host country, such as the children of the international
company employees, international establishments, foreign consulates, missions, or
evangelist courses (ISC Research, 2020). Cambridge International Examinations (CIE),
which offers both the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and
International Baccalaureate (IB), is part of the international curriculum. Pearson Edexcel
also offers IGCSE, International A-Levels, and BTEC vocational courses, as well as
curriculum and programs to prepare students for them.
International schools provide an international and portable curriculum geared toward
global citizenship (Hughes, 2020). It was birthed in Switzerland as an outgrowth of the
League of Nations (Hill, 2001). Most international schools share the use of English as a
language of instruction and the promotion of international mindedness (Bailey, 2021).
International schools are also powerful structures that are either self-governing or
managed by members of a chain of schools that engage in broader local and worldwide
connections. They gain from a modernization and neo-liberalization climate in several
countries. They are part of a well-organized system that offers a wide range of services
and prepares students to enter the workforce in the future (Kim, 2019). They are classified
as elite, with tremendously different populations that are socially and culturally stratified.
For any sort of Organisation, the global market presents unanticipated obstacles.
Organizations with a challenging, effective, and powerful leadership style can accept a
variety of obstacles. This is because the attitude of the personnel regarding the job is
affected by the leadership of the organization. In this modern-day, the role of the leaders
has evolved, and the success of an organization is determined by the leadership style
used (Riaz, Arif, Nisar, Ali & Sajjad, 2018). As a result, leadership, and job satisfaction
are critical in attracting and retaining outstanding personnel. For example, there were 7
million job openings in the United States as of November 30th, 2019 (Department of
Labor, 2020). During the same period, 5.6 million Americans resigned from their jobs to
work for other companies at the same time. The need for talented employees is at an all-
time high. This pattern reflects job dynamism, making it critical to comprehend
leadership’s job satisfaction relationship (Ratican, 2020). According to the findings of
Erawan, Agung, and Martin (2018), leadership has a positive and significant impact on
employee performance and job satisfaction. According to the result of the poll, there
were no preferred leadership styles, which ranged from democratic, transformational,
laissez-faire, and autocratic to transactional, but the leadership style employed relied on
the current scenario (Ratican, 2020).
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Job satisfaction has been a priority area for reducing teacher attrition internationally,
according to Carve-Thomas, Kini, and Burns (2020). If teachers are dissatisfied, then they
will seek employment in fields that provide them with satisfaction. Teacher attrition and
turnover are the leading causes of teacher shortages around the world. For example,
between 2016–2017 and 2017–2018, it was reported that 9% of California teachers
departed the state’s public school system. Almost all the demand for new teachers is driven
by attrition. Most of this attrition according to the national estimates happens when early
and mid-career teachers quit, owing to dissatisfaction with their jobs or the profession.
Retirements account for only one-third of attrition. Teachers that are unhappy with their
work will be unhappy with their lives, which will lead to poor teaching performance
(Bachtiar, Sudibjo, & Bernarto, 2018). According to Weiss, Kammeyer- Muller, and Hulin
(2017), job satisfaction is a pleasant and hopeful emotion that arises from the evaluation
of a person's work experience based on employees’ perceptions of how they perform, and
the tasks assigned to them.
An investigation was done by Mufti et al. (2019) on the impact of the leadership styles on
the psychological empowerment of the frontline employees and how it affects their levels of
job satisfaction in Pakistan. The study on the Non-Governmental organizations (NGOs)
operating in Pakistan’s two major cities (Islamabad and Peshawar) established that
transformational leadership had a considerable impact on job satisfaction with psychological
empowerment acting as a mediating component. When Adams and Velarde (2020) looked at
the several types of leadership styles used in international schools in Malaysia’s culturally
varied environment, they discovered that the transformational leadership style was the most
common. The school leaders had established procedures for
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establishing a shared mission and vision through the core values, curriculum, and co-
curricular activities.
In her study of the Tetu district, Oriha (2018) discovered that the head regularly applied
a laissez-faire and democratic leadership style. Teachers appear to be content with their
employment when heads engaged in a democratic style of leadership, according to the
research. Albugami (2020) found that head teachers who follow laissez-faire and
authoritarian leadership styles demotivate preschool teachers. When the head principal
adopts democratic and transformational leadership styles, however, these instructors
become motivated and inspired.
There are a variety of difficulties that contribute to a lack of job satisfaction globally.
One of the most pressing issues in the United States is the disparity in the classroom
time spent on real tutoring and learning between schools with different socioeconomic
backgrounds (Talis, 2019). Most teachers in England are quitting their jobs. Teachers
become unsatisfied with their careers when their motivation is poor owing to a lack of
freedom to execute their responsibilities. In today's world, there is a significant increase
in book-keeping and data entry. Tutor capacity is just insurmountable, owing to the
current ineffective accountability structure in educational institutions.
In Chile, 24 percent of teachers said they would like to stop instructing in the next five years
(Talis, 2019). This is linked to high levels of work-related stress and a stressful atmosphere.
Excessive management work is a source of stress for them at work. Teachers oversee
administrative responsibilities, student accomplishment, and an excessive amount
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of grading. Teachers in Japan are eager to change, according to the OECD (2020), because
of the low satisfaction created by the current work environment (Talis 2018), where 19
percent of teachers reported that having too many managerial jobs is a source of stress at
work.
According to Nick Kelly (2019), teachers in Australia are being set up to fail if they are
not well prepared for the job and supervised as well. In some places in South Africa,
professional development is lacking (Talis 2019). Developing progressive ICT skills is
one area where tutors throughout the OECD say they need more training, in addition to
teaching in multilingual/multicultural settings and coaching students with special needs.
Teachers' dissatisfaction in Kenyan British National Curriculum learning institutions has
been attributed to factors such as a lack of resources and opportunities for professional
progress (Makokha, 2014). Learners are required to receive good grades from their teachers.
They must ensure that students are fully engaged in their studies. Teachers must deal with
unnecessary stress from parents who do not value the important work they do. School
administrators have occasionally been unable to defend their staff, forcing them to deal with
irritated and angry parents who do not value their efforts, adding to the level of stress in
these educational institutions. Many of the pupils that attend these educational institutions
come from wealthy families (Poole, 2018). As a result of the character of the children they
work with, tutors are intimidated when dealing with discipline concerns.
Educational leaders play an important role in influencing the next generation. According
to Bozdoan and Aksoy (2020), heads of schools must tolerate a heavyweight of
accountability if they want their schools to flourish, as they are no different than
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organizational executives. Imende, Maureen, Gogo, Thomas, and Olel (2020) all agree
with these sentiments. Schools also require leaders with leadership styles who have a
significant impact on the attitudes of the institution's employees. As a result, the success
of an institution is determined by the leadership style selected by its leaders. Good
leadership styles are a vital component of successful productivity efforts (Torres, 2019).
Democratic, autocratic, laissez-faire, and transformative leadership styles are among the
leadership styles in use.
According to Munir and Iqbal (2018), a democratic approach to leadership, also known
as participative leadership, encourages employees to participate in the decision-making
process in the learning institution. The autocratic leadership style, also known as the
authoritarian leadership style, is a management technique in which one leader can make
decisions without input from others (Shi, Yu & Zeng, 2020). The Laissez-faire
leadership style gives their subordinates the authority to make decisions about their job.
According to Serah and Khurram (2018), the laissez-faire leadership style happens when
institutional administrators lack the essential authority over their personnel. Employee
job satisfaction is influenced by transformation leadership through learning and
innovation. Bernarto, Bachtiar, Sudibjo, Suryawan, Purwanto, and Asbari (2020) believe
that transformation leadership is characterized by positive behavior such as motivating
teachers to solve problems in their daily lives, providing a solution by giving instructions
or ideas when a teacher is frustrated and having difficulties at work, and so on.
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Statement of the Problem
Several studies have found that teachers are dissatisfied with their jobs, which has
resulted in increased teacher attrition in schools. According to Ovenden-Hope and Passy
(2020), finding and retaining qualified teachers is a challenge that contributes to the
shortage of teachers. The reason for this is that international schools all over the world
are competing with other local schools for survival in the market. This has driven some
international schools, such as those in China, to go to extremes to sell their schools. For
example, the rise of background promotion projects has been designed to strengthen the
application of elite university aspirants (Chen, 2020). As a result, the instructor is
compelled to labor under duress to ensure that the criteria are met. Most elite schools
that were founded within a national framework have been internationalized in recent
decades to cope with the changing conditions of society in this postmodern era and to
remain competitive in this highly competitive educational market (Garcia-Moreno,
2019). In Africa, similar competitiveness can be seen, with Kenya as one example
(Nderitu, Chui, & Edabu, 2020). When the stakes for the school are high, teachers are
compelled to strive even harder to fulfill the goals. As a result, teachers who are unable
to meet the challenge are compelled to leave those institutions. Additionally, In Kenya,
poor administrative support, job dissatisfaction due to the location of the school, poor
salaries, family engagements, and discipline problems, are some of the reasons why
teachers leave the profession (Mabeya, Gikuhi & Ntabo, 2019).
With all the above issues being identified, leadership takes the center stage. The focus on
leadership for learning has been related to the notion of the headteacher's responsibility
(Sleiman, 2020). In today's international school discourse, however, a headteacher is a
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dynamic communicator in all forms who generate higher enrollment rates, establishes
partnerships with the community as well as local and global stakeholders, and guarantees
that the schools progress from great to great (Doyle, 2019). The gleaming profile in a well-
designed brochure or on a well-designed website does not tell the entire story. The truth is
that leading an international school is a more difficult job than it appears. While these
schools promote democratic ideas and encourage international-mindedness and global
citizenship, most of them are privately or corporately owned and part of a global network.
Their market agendas may spark a leadership challenge, which will exacerbate other
problems. International schools have become an appealing career choice for an already
big and steadily expanding number of educators who value stability and security (Rey,
Bolay & Gez, 2020). The current growth pattern is moving toward a more planned, mature,
and interdependent "organic solidarity" mode of activity (Bunell, 2020), with schools
increasingly belonging to chains in addition to networks of schools (e.g., GEMS
Education) and catering to the local population, is distinct from the previous scenario.
Relevant problems that may have an impact on teachers' job happiness have been
discussed. They did not, however, investigate the function of the headteacher and his or
her leadership style in dealing with those challenges, which has an impact on teacher job
satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to see if the leadership styles of head teachers
affect teacher work satisfaction in a sample of international schools in Nairobi County
because the headteacher plays such an important role in the school.
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