Investigating the Role of Visionary and Empowering Leadership of School Principals on Teacher's Change Tendencies by Mediating Role of Teachers’ Organizational Learning and Professional Development

The purpose of the research was to investigate the role of visionary leadership and empowering leadership of school principals On Teacher's Change Tendencies by mediating role of teachers’ organizational learning and professional development. The research population was all the primary school teachers of Kurdistan province. Of those, 364 teachers were selected by proportional stratified random sampling based on the Cochran's Formula. The research method was a quantitative correlational study based on the covariance based structural equation modeling approach. To collect data, the empowering leadership questionnaire (Ahearn, Mathieu and Rapp, 2005); visionary leadership questionnaire (Kanger and Kanango, 1998); Organizational learning questionnaire (Garcia Morales et al., 2006); professional development questionnaire (Nova's, 2008) and tendency to change questionnaire (Dunham et al, 1989) were used. The reliability and validity of the questionnaires were evaluated by the Cronbach's alpha coefficients and confirmatory factor analysis. To analyze the data, structural equation modeling was used by Lisrel software. The results showed that: visionary and empowering leadership of school principals had a direct, positive and meaningful effect on teachers' organizational learning, teachers' professional development and teachers' change tendencies. They had also a positive and significant indirect effect on teachers' change tendencies through organizational learning and professional development. The variables of visionary and empowering leadership of school principals, teachers' organizational learning, and teachers' professional development were able to explain 0.13 of the variance of teachers' change tendencies.