The relationship of secondary school principal's locus of control, tenure in office, and critical thinking to organizational ability

Abstract

The major purpose of this inquiry was to investigate and analyze the relationships of secondary school principals' locus of control, tenure in office, and critical thinking ability to their organizational ability. Thirty subjects were randomly selected from a population of 120 suburban secondary principals in Harris County, Texas. The subjects were each administered the Rotter I-E Scale, tenure in office questionnaire, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, and an organizational ability in-basket. The in-basket assessed the principals' capacity to plan, schedule, and control the work of others; skill in using resources in an optimal fashion; ability to deal with a volume of paperwork and heavy demands on time. Data were analyzed using the computer package Analysis of Behavioral Science Data (AOBSD). Correlation and multiple regression analysis were used to analyze the relationships. The routine utilized to provide the correlation coefficients and regression models was program REGRAN from the AOBSD package. The findings revealed that the relationship between principals' locus of control and organizational ability was not significant when tested at the .05 level. The Rotter I-E Scale scores accounted for 3% of the variance in the in-basket scores. Similar results were discovered when principals' Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal scores were correlated with their scores on the organizational ability in-basket. This analysis showed that critical thinking ability accounted for 3% of the variance in organizational ability. A significant relationship was discovered, however, between principals' tenure in office and their scores on the in-basket. The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient of r = 0.5428 was determined to be statistically significant when tested at the .01 level with 28 degrees of freedom. Tenure in office accounted for 29% of the variance in organizational ability. Multiple regression analysis disclosed that when a combination of all three independent variables were regressed on organizational ability, tenure in office accounted for nearly all the variance. The additive effects of locus of control and critical thinking ability in the full regression model were negligible.