The Move toward Transformational Leadership.

Abstract

Instructional is an idea that has served many schools well throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s. But in light of current restructuring initiatives designed to take schools into the 21 st century, no longer appears to capture the heart of what school administration will have to become. Transformational leader ship evokes a more appropriate range of practice; it ought to subsume instructional leadership as the domi nant image of school administration, at least during the '90s. Sarason (1990) claims that the blame for the predictable failure of educational reform rests, in large measure, on existing power relation ships in schools: relationships among teachers and administrators, parents and school staffs, students and teachers. His view is widely held: most initiatives that fly the restruc turing banner advocate strategies for altering power relationships. They include school-site management, increasing parents' and teachers' participation in decision making, and enhancing opportunities for the exer cise of teacher leadership (Sykes 1990). In these respects, the restruc turing of schools is analogous to the groundshift in large businesses and industries begun more than a decade ago from Type A toward Type Z orga nizations (Ouchi 1981). Type A orga nizations, very useful for some situa tions and tasks, centralize control and maintain differences in status between workers and managers and among levels of management; they also rely on decision processes. Such organizations, which include the tradi tional school, are based on competi tive (Roberts 1986) or top-down (Dunlap and Goldman 1991) power. This is the power to control to control the selection of new employees, the allocation of resources, and the focus for professional development. One cannot do away with this form of power without losing one's share. It is a zero-sum gain. In contrast. Type Z organizations rely on strong cultures to influence