School Leadership and Innovative Principals: Implications for Enhancing Principals' Leadership Knowledge and Practice

The critical importance of the leader for identifying and creating new opportunities to improve organizations' performance has been emphasized. Recent research on the interplay between school leadership and entrepreneurship has also highlighted the key roles of school principals and teachers in bringing about educational changes by recognizing new opportunities as well as developing and implementing innovative ideas and approaches to different aspects of educating pupils. To do so, school leaders have to face fundamental challenges of influencing and regulating teachers' practices toward fulfilling educational goals by discovering and enacting innovative opportunities and empowering them to change their current traditional practices to innovative ones. Entrepreneurial leadership style enables school leaders to not only face these challenges and the complexities but also overcome the various constraints in the school environment by its focus on both leaders' innovative competencies and their ability to influence and direct the followers' performance toward innovative opportunity recognition and exploitation. However, research on the impact of entrepreneurial leadership on innovativeness in Malaysian schools is scarce. This quantitative study is an attempt to narrow the gap by examining school principals' entrepreneurial leadership practices and their innovative behaviours as perceived by the teachers. A questionnaire consisting of SO items on entrepreneurial leadership and 14 items on school innovativeness was administered to 294 secondary school teachers. Findings suggest that although teachers perceive entrepreneurial leadership as highly important for school leaders, the principals moderately practice this type of leadership style. Furthermore, teachers from ordinary academic schools perceived entrepreneurial leadership as more important and frequently practiced by their school principals compared with high performing school teachers. This study also found higher teachers' perceptions of school innovativeness if the principals have management training. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between frequency of principals' entrepreneurial leadership practices and school innovativeness. Implications of the findings to improve school principals' entrepreneurial leadership knowledge and practice are discussed in this paper.