Return on management: Designing and explaining the new model of educational managers' competencies with the thematic analysis approach

In all organizations including educational organizations, the most important source that influence on organizational effectiveness is management. Leadership competency is one of the major qualities of Principal to ensure the performance of schools. The principal is the curriculum leader of the school. He or she is responsible for designing, implementing, and evaluating changes in the instructional program of the school. In each educational system, the nation designs the broad curriculum policy in strict consonance with its socio-economic and cultural needs. The principal implements and evaluates the changes in the instructional program. There are new streams of research in the field of education and management to know the necessary competencies of school principals. The importance of education and training perused researchers and scholars to investigate the relationship between the characteristics and competencies of school’s principals and the outcomes and results of such leadership in terms of the education performance of students. The importance of the school principals has growing so fast and researchers had put emphasize on the importance of principles skills, competencies and capabilities. This study is about " Return on management: Designing and explaining the new model of educational managers' competencies with the thematic analysis approach. The aim of this research is to extract the model for the competencies of the school principals. So the purpose of this study is answering the following questions:• What are the important characteristics and competencies of school principals?
• What is the conceptual framework for the competencies of the school principals?
To answer the questions, we followed qualitative approach of thematic analyses. This thematic analysis was the first qualitative analysis which the process includes 6 steps: knowing the data, searching for the themes, evaluating the themes, identification and coding the themes and providing the reports. After studying the resources extracted from the databases. This content analysis was based on two approaches. First, we assigned codes to text fragments using a bottom-up approach, i.e. without strong a priori assumptions. This approach allowed us to move back and forth between the transcribed interviews and to identify themes and codes in order to arrive at a more accurate inductive and explorative analysis. Subsequently, we adopted a more top-down approach, known as directed content analysis, in which we related our codes to the academic literature. To derive systematic explanations for the processes we observed, we identified observations that matched theoretical concepts. By thematic analysis, the paper presents a framework for competencies of educational managers and the reliability of results was checked by Holsti test (0.95).
The statistical populations of this research are the relevant sources available for online databases and valid scientific banks during the period 2000-2018. In order to have a systematic research the main key words and themes have been searched through web of science and different research engines. Some of these words and themes are, "School Principal”, “School Leadership" "Management" “Educational Administration "School Leaders", "Educational Management" leadership “Competencies” which had been research through both national and international scholar’s research platforms. In total 200 papers have been selected, and after the second observation 70 of them were selected for study. Theses selected papers been analyzed word by word and they had been coded.
Based on the findings of this study, the competencies of the educational managers can be summarized in the four themes of know-ability, spiritual excellence, mobilize-ability and sustain-ability. Know-ability consists of two pre-organizing themes (learning-teaching and organizational) and 8 basic themes. The learning-teaching consists of 4 themes of creative learning, life and job skills, social media, and technology and 21 century skills. The learning organization has also 4 themes. These are human resource management, vision, learning environment, standardizing and performance evaluation.
Spiritual excellence consists of 3 pre-organizing themes (love of being, spiritual world and faith and hope) and 9 basic themes. Mobilize-ability consists of 4 pre-organizing themes (collaborative, communication management, global perspective and leading), and 8 basic themes. Collaborative skills include team working and grouping and the communication management has two themes of inter-relationship and intra-relationship skills. Global perspective and leading includes knowledge exchange and policy. Finally sustain-ability consists of 5 pre-organizing themes (technology management, sustainable financial management, innovation management, environmental management and sustainable health management) and 13 basic themes. This theme has an ultimate goal of the sustainability and success of school in the long term.
Technology management is including the two abilities of networking and information technology. Sustainable financial management includes financial and budget management, social capital and wealth creation. The innovation management has four themes in terms of risk taking, creative thinking, innovation and entrepreneurship. Environmental management is in terms of environment knowledge and environment management. Finally sustainable health management, consist of physical health and spiritual health.
The model can be used for school principals as well as managers as a tool for evaluating and selecting principals based on the proposed criteria. Based on the fact that the extracting the competencies and right characteristics are important issue in human resource, the research may have several implications for both principals and education system. The education and training system can use the result for replacing the right persons and recruit the right persons, and principals that have the importance requirements and competencies.
The education and training organization can use this framework to elaborate on their school principals to train and educate them in the way that they can increase the level of the different competencies and capabilities in their managers. Also the educators and trainers who set up workshops for training the future managers can use such framework to invest efficiently in their human resource capabilities. This will ultimately lead to better education system and schools.
Future research can use other approaches than thematic analysis for extracting the principal’s competencies. Also researchers can conduct several surveys to test the effect of these competencies and fond the level of importance for each competency. Moreover it might be a case that depend on the context and country some of these competencies be more important than others.