Emotional maturity and leadership styles among Secondary school teachers in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Emotion plays a vital role in one‘s personality. Emotional Maturity means a person‘s ability to control his/her emotions and express them in a socially desirable manner. If a person is emotionally matured, he or she can control his/her emotions. The teacher as the major guiding figure of the students in the school should have emotional maturity, and teachers with many years of experience should be more intimately involved in leadership and decision making in their schools. Leadership style is the approach of providing direction, implementing a plan and motivating people in attaining a goal. The researcher intended to identify the relationship between Emotional Maturity and Leadership styles of teachers and to find the significant difference in Emotional Maturity of teachers at different levels of education and at different ages. The convergent parallel mix method was used for the study. Questionnaires and interviews were used to collect data and the data gathered through interviews was analyzed using quotes, themes, and narrative descriptions. Questionnaires were processed using descriptive statistical methods. Participants for the study were selected from the Badulla District, Welimada Educational Zone using simple random sampling techniques. The results of the study revealed that most of the teachers possessed a moderate level of emotional maturity. Moreover, 68.89% of the teachers were highly autocratic, and 11.11% were extremely autocratic. 44.44% of teachers were highly democratic and 42.22% were extremely democratic. 6.67% were extreme followers of the Laissez-faire style, and 40% were moderate followers of the Laissez-faire style. The correlation value was 0.004 and it indicated that there was a significantly low positive correlation between Emotional maturity and Leadership style among the teachers in the schools in Sri Lanka.