Leadership styles of school heads and master teachers and their influence on beginning teachers’ performance

This study determined the leadership styles of school heads and master teachers and their influence on beginning teachers’ performance in Vinzons District, Camarines Norte. Employing a quantitative descriptive-correlational research design, data were gathered from 63 beginning teachers with one to three years in service, composed of 49 elementary teachers and 14 secondary teachers, alongside the participation of school heads and master teachers through total enumeration. A structured survey questionnaire was used to measure the perceived leadership styles, namely democratic, autocratic, laissez-faire, transformational, and transactional, and their influence across four domains: content knowledge and pedagogy, learning environment and diversity of learners, curriculum and planning, and assessment and reporting. Descriptive statistics, particularly weighted mean, were used to describe the extent of leadership styles and level of influence, while Pearson product-moment correlation was applied to test the significant relationships between the variables. The findings revealed that democratic leadership emerged as the most practiced leadership style, while the leadership styles of school heads and master teachers were found to be very influential across all four domains. Furthermore, democratic, autocratic, transformational, and transactional leadership styles had significant positive relationships with the level of influence on beginning teachers, whereas laissez-faire leadership showed no significant relationship. Based on the results, the proposed Leadership Style-Responsive Coaching was developed to strengthen leadership support and improve beginning teachers’ performance across the four domains.