Filming and Surveying the Behavior of Dutch Primary School Leaders: How Transformational Are the Effective Ones?

We hypothesized that effective school leaders would display more transformational leadership behavior than their less effective counterparts. We sampled 21 primary school leaders of a Dutch city school system and filmed these leaders during regular meetings with their teachers. We then meticulously coded their behaviors and compared them to leadership content obtained through extant survey questions: perceptions of the leaders, their teachers and local school-system experts. All leaders were found to display a diverse behavioral repertoire and their actual and perceived transformational behavior was correlated with independent effectiveness ratings. We conclude that there is added value to systematically filming leaders.