A CASE-STUDY OF EMPOWERING PRINCIPAL BEHAVIOR

During the past decade there has been considerable criticism of administrative leadership behavior in schools. Criticism has focused on the hegemony of autocratic forms of leadership as well as on the manipulation inherent in leadership practices that ''sell '' leader-held conceptions of organization direction and practice to followers. Principals have been exhorted to empower teachers. However much of the empowerment literature promotes a narrow conception of empowerment; more expansive constructs are long on concept and theory and short on field-based examples of principal behavior that inform practice. This study addresses this criticism by integrating an iteration of a recently developed theoretical empowerment framework with field-based data collected in a case study of one principal.