Abdul Ghani Abdullah

Principal's Transformational Democratic Leadership: the Impact of Principal's Transformational Democratic Leadership Style on Teachers' Job Satisfaction and Commitment Abdul Ghani Abdullah

School Leadership practice in Malaysia is keeping apace with contemporary recommendations that school principals adopt a more democratic and transformational leadership as a way to promote higher levels of school performance and greater teachers' job satisfaction. These principals generally upheld participatory and collaborative management, relations-oriented and established trusting relationship with teachers. They too possessed the attributes of transformational leadership, such as individualized consideration, idealized influence and intellectual stimulation. Through their communicative virtue and ability to shed their status and back away from power hierarchies, these transformational democratic leaders were able to empower their teachers and forge a more dispersed and democratic form of leadership in schools. As teachers became more highly educated, they expected greater autonomy;though some teachers not in the administrative team were generally concern about their instructional autonomy and had no interest over the school overall policy.