Date
7-15-2024
Department
School of Education
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in Education (PhD)
Chair
Janice Kooken
Keywords
teacher shortage, principal personality, five-factor personality theory, teacher commitment
Disciplines
Education | Psychology
Recommended Citation
Blair, Brittani LeAnna, "Teacher Perceptions of Principal Personality and Intent to Remain: A Causal-Comparative Study" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 5783.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/5783
Abstract
The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study is to explore the relationship between teachers' perceptions of their principals' personality traits, based on the big-five factor structure, and the teachers' intentions to remain in the teaching profession. Research indicates school leadership significantly influences American teachers' commitment to teaching, highlighting the need to understand teachers' perceptions of principal personality traits given the teacher shortage crisis in the United States. Data from a sample of 278 teachers was collected using an online Qualtrics survey that included the M5-50 personality questionnaire items and an item related to teacher intent to remain in the profession. The five personality domains are agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, and neuroticism. Each of the five personality factors have ten corresponding items on the M5-50, rated on a Likert scale of one to five with higher item averages indicating higher perceptual presence of the personality trait. The participants were sorted into three groups based on their level of commitment to the teaching profession. The data were exported from Qualtrics into SPSS where five one-way ANOVAs were performed on the groups, one ANOVA for each of the five-factor personality domains. The findings suggest that teachers who intend to remain in the profession perceive higher levels of principal openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extraversion compared to teachers who intend to leave. Recommendations for future research include further study on principal personality traits and teacher retention rates using randomized samples and exploration into perceptions of personality using a pre-test/post-test experimental design.
