Abstract:

Recent studies on social intelligence, which defined as the ability to understand the emotions, thoughts, and intentions of people through their apparent expressions and behaviours, have confirmed the great difference of performance between socially intelligent leaders and those who not. In this study, it was aimed to investigate the effect of social intelligence levels of school principals on their leadership behaviours. It was designed according to the mixed method research methodology. The working group of the quantitative phase of the study consisted of 217 school principals working at secondary schools in Şahinbey district centre of Gaziantep. The working group in qualitative phase included 20 school principals determined by the snowball sampling method. The quantitative data of the study were collected through Tromso Social Intelligence Scale developed by Silvera et al. (2001) and the Leader Behaviour Scale by Alia (2015) and a semi-structured interview protocol was used to collect qualitative data. While regression and correlation analyses were performed in the analysis of quantitative data, content analysis technique was used for qualitative data. According to the findings of the study, there exists a statistically significant relationship between the social intelligence levels and the leadership behaviours of school principals at a moderate level. Furthermore, the social intelligence levels of school principals can meaningfully predict their leadership behaviours. Moreover, principals with high social skills will exhibit participative and supportive leadership behaviours such as creating social environments, building good relationships and acting together in the decision making process in order to increase their interaction and sharing with teachers.

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