School principals’ leadership skills: measurement equivalence across cultures

Abstract

Despite substantial interest and research in measuring leader’s skills, little is known about the measurement equivalence and mean differences in the scores measuring principals’ skills (cognitive, interpersonal, strategic) across cultures (collectivism versus individualism). The aim of the present study was to assess measurement equivalence – configural, metric and scalar – on leaders’ skills across Arab and Jewish teachers in the Israeli educational system. A total of 1388 teachers from 210 elementary schools responded to a skills questionnaire. Results indicated that the configural model is equivalent across samples. The test for metric equivalence, showed that the construct holds the same psychological meaning across the two samples, with the exception of two items. The intercept latent test means (i.e., scalar) showed unequal intercepts among the Arab and Jewish samples, in the strategic and cognitive skills scale. The results have implications for cross-ethnic research and, more broadly, for the assessment of principals’ skills.

Keywords:

• Leader’s skills
• measurement equivalence
• collectivism
• individualism
• inequality

Notes

1. As shown in Table 1, item 17 expresses the cognitive skill of ‘active learning’, and item 16 emphasizes ‘reading comprehension’.

2. In this analysis across the two groups, I considered the Arab group as the reference group: the latent means were fixed to a value of 0.0. Regarding the Jewish group, I removed the zero value assigned to each of the factor means and replaced it with an appropriate label (this allows these parameters to be freely estimated for the Jewish group).