The Effect of School Leadership Style upon the Creativity of Physical Education Teachers with Creative Self-efficacy as an Intermediary

In order to achieve the goals physical education pursues in schools, creative teachers are required, and the present research has endeavored to study the effect of the leadership styles undertaken by school principals upon the creativity of physical education teachers with self-efficacy as an intermediary. The research has followed a descriptive-correlational approach, and structural equations have been used. The statistical population consisted of all of the 1413 physical education teachers in the province of East Azerbaijan in the 2019-2020 school year, 303 of whom were selected as the sample by means of Krejcie and Morgan’s table and stratified-cluster sampling. Eventually, once data collection was completed, 291 questionnaires were analyzed. Assessing the variables has been done using multifactor questionnaires – for leadership devised by Bass and Avolio (2000), for creative self-efficacy devised by Beghetto (2006) and creativity devised by Torrance (1974) – the reliability and validity of all of which have been verified. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equations by means of LISREL software have been used for data analysis. The findings pointed out that a transformational leadership style can influence the creativity and creative self-efficacy of physical education teachers, while transactional leadership and laissez-faire styles lead to no effect upon the creativity of physical education teachers. The results also showed that a transformational leadership style by means of creative self-efficacy has an indirect effect upon the creativity of physical education teachers. As indicated by the findings of the research, school principals' use of transformational leadership style can, by means of inspiring, empowering, and enhancing trust and creative self-efficacy in physical education teachers, increase their creativity. Therefore, it is recommended that school principals use a transformational teaching style so as to increase the creativity of physical education teachers.