The relationship between emotional competence and instructional leadership and their association with learner achievement

The mandated approach to school leadership in South Africa has not produced any significant improvement in learner achievement during the last decade. A new approach to leadership with greater emphasis on the ideographic or individual dimension of school leadership is necessary. This research investigated teachers' perceptions of the extent that their principals' utilised emotional competence and instructional leadership to influence learner achievement. The structures of emotional competence and instructional leadership were investigated using factor analysis and Structural Equation Modeling. Emotional competence was composed of intrapersonal and interpersonal factors, while instructional leadership had four components, namely, ensuring coherence between teaching and learning, modeling effective teaching, facilitating learner achievement and protecting instructional time. These constructs were linked to learner achievement data. The various measures of fit indicated that the postulated model fitted the data well. Intrapersonal emotional competence impacted directly on interpersonal emotional competence and on modeling effective teaching, while having an indirect influence on all the other components of instructional leadership. The postulated pathways in the model were statistically significant and substantively meaningful. The model suggested by this research indicates that learner achievement can be influenced in a collaborative way by school leaders via utilisation of emotional competence and the four components of instructional leadership.