Comparative Study and Benchmarking of the Selection of Future Principals for Secondary Schools

Managers are one of the important elements of an organization, for this reason, in order to draw the future of the organization, it is necessary for the planners to specify the conditions of their selection and appointment. Therefore, the current research has been done with the aim of identifying and analyzing the components of selecting future principals.

In this research, comparative and benchmarking method is used as a prospective approach. This approach is based on the belief that today's advanced organizations/countries can be considered as a model for the future of another organization/countries in their respective subjects. For this, first, the fields of comparison and benchmarking were determined using Brody's four-step comparison method; then the countries of Canada, Finland, Australia, South Africa, and Japan were selected according to the qualitative balance value in the international advanced TEAMS test, human development index, life quality index(health, instruction, and welfare), education quality index, and other scientific-scholarly indexes; finally, by extracting the criteria for the selection and appointment of principals through content analysis and comparison with Iran, the proposed framework for Iran has been presented.

A total of 61 components for the selection of secondary school principals were identified from among the studies conducted in the selected countries in this article. By extracting the commonalities and differences of each of the components among the countries, it was found that the highest index of manager selection and appointment belongs to Japan and the lowest one is related to Finland.

There are similarities between the components of selection of principals of secondary schools in Iran and selected countries. In Iran, special attention should be paid to important components such as adherence to religious principles, appropriate personality traits, creativity and innovation, motivation to develop capabilities, professional growth, power of supervision and accountability, social image, leader skills, and purposefulness and foresight.