The significance of Empowering Leadership towards High-Performance School Leaders in Malaysian High-Performance Schools

Abstract

This study supports the aspirations of MEB 2013-2015 by identifying the best practices of leadership to achieve outstanding student performance as well as to maintain the high performance of schools. Therefore, this study examines the influence of empowering leadership towards high performance school leaders in primary schools of East Coast Malaysia. The instrument used is a questionnaire adopted from several questionnaires developed by previous researches on empowerment and high-performance school leaders. A total of 486 questionnaires were distributed to the respondents of 14 high performing primary schools in Kelantan, Terengganu and Pahang using the random sampling technique. With a 58 percent return rate, the data were analyzed using SmartPLS version 3.28 for descriptive analysis, measurement model and structural model. The findings show that variables of empowering leadership exerted a significant influence on high performance school leaders. In addition, the results of this study support the contributions of the study that have been proposed. The findings of this study will contribute to future research, particularly to researchers aiming to examine this leadership style in depth on school performance in Malaysia.