Abstract
This study investigated how emotional intelligence relates to instructional leadership as a strategy to enhance the quality of education leadership practice. There is a current need in South Africa to improve education leadership practice in order to improve the quality of education. This study is located in the post positivist paradigm and a quantitative research approach was employed. Two instruments were utilised to collect data, namely, the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal to measure the level of principals’ emotional intelligence and the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale, to measure principals’ instructional leadership in selected components of instructional leadership. The dimension of instructional leadership that was the focus of this research was ‘Managing the Instructional Programme’ which comprises three components: ‘Supervise and Evaluate Instruction’, ‘Coordinate the Curriculum’, and ‘Monitor Student Progress’.
Descriptive statistics were used to obtain a biographical profile of the participants with respect to attributes such as age, ethnicity, gender, qualifications, and experience. These statistics provided an outline of the nature and distribution of participants’ responses to the two data collection instruments. Inferential statistics, more specifically Pearson’s correlation coefficient, was used to determine the relationship between two sets of interval or ratio data. Testing for statistical significance was undertaken.
The findings indicated that emotional intelligence was moderately related to the instructional leadership components of Supervise and Evaluate Instruction’, ‘Coordinate the Curriculum’, and ‘Monitor Student Progress’. Age, ethnicity, years of experience and leadership experience were not statistically significantly related to emotional intelligence. However, the findings indicate that gender was moderately related to emotional intelligence because the emotional intelligence score of females compared to males was slightly higher. The research findings further revealed that emotional intelligence was positively related to principals’ instructional leadership performance. It is recommended that emotional intelligence is an area that ought to be considered for the professional development of principals. Emotional intelligence could also be considered by principal selection committees when they draft interview questions. This study draws attention to the concept of emotional intelligence as an...
M.Ed.