The Summary of School Leaderships Theories According to Malaysia Perspectives

This study will look at English-language publications on school leadership, worldwide trends, and Malaysian research. The methodology includes a comprehensive review of journal articles and book chapters about school leadership research published in the English language. To find a potential gap in the current literature and advise a school leadership researcher on the best future research direction. According to the findings, existing leadership theories were all established and honed in Western contexts, raising concerns about their applicability for Malaysian circumstances. The findings show that more research utilizing a qualitative method is needed to tailor the theory to local situations. This study contributes to the inadequate information base on leadership in Malaysia and throws light on the evolution of educational systems by providing foundational knowledge and guidance for scholars and practitioners.


Introduction
Leadership, particularly 'principle' leadership, has been the focus of numerous studies since the 60s, as schools have been expected to develop and reform (Hallinger, 2011;Henkel & Bourdeau, 2018;Pont, 2020;Thompson & Glasø, 2018;Walker & Hallinger, 2015). These aspirations are bolstered by demand for increased responsibility at the school level (Bae, 2018). Furthermore, as a result of the accountability movement, the meaning of school leadership has significantly change. These days, it's uncommon to come across a school that doesn't have a public demand for change. Due to this, a school must first have a leader who can organize educators and school employees into various courses of action to move in the direction of specified goals, enhancing efficiency, and obtaining all members of the school organization to work towards the organizational strategy (Hung & Ponnusamy, 2010).
According to recent studies, school leadership is second only to classroom instruction in terms of influence on student learning and the ability to propel academic advancement in students' academic (Blase & Blase, 2000;Leithwood, Harris, & Hopkins, 2020;Seashore et al., 2010b). That is the reason why it is critical that principals set high expectations for student accomplishment and work to enhance the school climate on a constant basis (Hussain, Salfi, & Virk, 2014). Due to this matter, leadership is all too important to be ignored in any organisations such as schools (Bryman, 2011;Datnow, 2001).

Literature Review
What is leadership? Leadership is a process of which an individual can enlist the help and support of others to accomplish a common goal (Chemers, 1997;Praszkier, 2017). According to Avolio, Walumbwa and Weber (2009), leadership is defined as the dynamic interaction of followers, peers, supervisors, work, context, and culture, which is a much larger phrase to encompass the complete spectrum of leadership. Leadership is now presented in numerous paradigms as dyadic, shared, strategic, relational, bounded by cultures, global, and a complex social dynamic, rather than just as an individual quality or difference (Avolio, 2007;Yulk, 2010). Although the said leadership behaviours are still significant for team leadership, other behaviours are also thought vital. The majority of behavioural theories discuss leadership in a variety of groups and teams and leadership in executive teams (Yulk, 2010).
From the Great Man Theory to Trait Theory, Behavioral Theory, Contingency Theory, and Transactional-Transformational Theory, leadership theories have come a long way (Halaychik, 2010;Khan, Bhat, & Hussanie, 2017). Initially, the concept of "leadership" was primarily reserved for corporations, private businesses, and military organizations (Gonzales, 2016;Stewart, 2006). However, not long after that school organization recognize the importance of leadership in schools, follow accordingly. As a result of this, Hallinger and Murphy developed the concept of Instructional Leadership Theory in the 1980s in school setting (Hallinger & Murphy, 1987). Their work was mostly focused on school's improvements. This went on until the early 1990s. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, Leithwood and Jantzi (1999) began using transformational and transactional models developed from Burn, Bass, and Avolio's work in a school setting (Stewart, 2006). The adaptation from military setting, found its success in schools and this followed by more and more empirical studies after that.
Researchers frequently characterize leadership in terms of their own perspectives and the most fascinating features of the phenomena. For example, Seashore et al. (2010a) believe that leadership is about organizational improvement, defining agreed-upon and worthwhile goals for the organization, and doing whatever it takes to explore and assist individuals in moving in those goals. In a nutshell, it's all about influence and direction. According to Hulpia and Devos (2010), leadership practises include the quality and allocation of leadership functions, social contact, participation of the leadership team, and participatory decision-making. While Yulk (2010), concludes that, while the definition of leadership varies depending on the researcher's goals, leadership is defined The process of influencing others to comprehend and agree on what and how it should be done, as well as the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to achieve shared goals. The term includes attempts to influence and facilitate the group's or organization's current activities and efforts to guarantee that it is equipped to tackle future difficulties. Overall, the literature review will try to exhaust all available research in order to come up with the best functional definition for effective leadership characteristics that will motivate students to succeed.

Current Leadership Theories In The Education Setting In Malaysia
When dealing with their organizations, Malaysian principals have been found to prefer leadership models like instructional leadership, transformational leadership, situational leadership, and distributed leadership (Arokiasamy et al., 2016;Bush et al., 2018;Chan & Shidu, 2009). If we look into Western counterparts' experiences up to the moment of this writing, we are able to adopt a variety of school's leadership philosophies. However, is should not translate into a direct cut and paste job as contextually there are elements that are not too compatible with our culture, customs, or morals (Bush et al., 2018). Thus, it is again imperative to clarify the prior knowledge we have about leadership in Malaysia before subscribing to various theories. This, if not curbed, will throw us into further confusion and defeat the purpose of finding the best leadership practices that can improve students' outcomes. Of course, with a thorough literature analysis, we should now be able to identify the most common leadership styles in Malaysia.

Instructional Leadership
Instructional leadership models emerged in the early 80s from early research on effective schools. The use of directing leadership centred on curriculum and instruction from the principal, which is a feature of schools that effectively teach students in underprivileged urban populations, is one of the advantages of this style (Hallinger, 2011;Robinson, 2007;Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008). Hallinger (2003) further stated that instructional leadership has three main goals: defining the school's objective, administering the instructional programme, and establishing a healthy school learning climate. In terms of empirical evidence, it has a lot of support. According to his latest studies, the school principal plays a critical impact in school performance as evaluated by student success. However, there is still a lot of uncertanity when it comes to the exact behaviours of principles that influence students' achievements.
The critics of this notion argue that school leaders can't handle such broad responsibilities because they're accountable for a numerous time-consuming administrative work, and principals are also demanded to be subject specialists in all areas, which are impossible (Gumus et al., 2016;Seashore et al., 2010a). It's also stated that instructional leadership has an indirect effect on student achievement, thus insufficient to explain the full transformation of students' achievement at the school level. Furthermore, relying solely on a few research findings to support the favourable impact of a secondary school principal's instructional leadership behaviour on student achievement is consider as insufficient. Perhaps it can be argued that "counting the few votes" supporting the positive effect of the secondary school principal's instructional leadership behaviour on student achievement is far fetch. However it may still necessary to tweak the study methods, rather than continuing with "outliers" studies, for example by designing quasiexperimental studies with control groups and pre and post-tests (Gaziel, 2017). Regardless of what has been claimed, this paradigm influenced much of the preconceive idea about effective principal leadership in the 1980s and 1990s. At least in the United States, this model's growing popularity was quickly reflected in its broad adoption as the preferred model by most major leadership academies (Hallinger, 2003).
In local context, instructional leadership remain to be a popular choice among principles of schools. The education ministry's strong support visible as most of instructional training takes place in the district, emphasizing the preference. Low-performing district officers are defined in the government reports, such as the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025 (Ministry of Education, 2011). As individuals who have failed to conduct instructional leadership in their districts. Districts are constantly being reminded of instructional leadership ideas and practises, such as the requirement to analyze curriculum management in their schools and prioritizing monitoring at the school level, hoping for teachers to be more effective and exciting. The education board of the district also focuses on instructional leadership practises among school leaders in order for them to be agent of change and achieve greater goals (Hassan, Ahmad, & Boon, 2018). Overall, school leaders should function as instructional leaders who actively participate in teacher development by planning, coordinating, and assessing the teaching and learning process to impact students' academic progress positively.

Transformational Leadership
In their studies on the military, commercial, and educational organizations Bass and Avolio (1990) coined the phrase transformative leadership. They conducted extensive research into what is thought to be the new paradigm of transformative leadership during that time. Most of their research stems from the deficiencies and inadequacies that were from Burns' earlier work. Nevertheless, they discovered evidence that transformational leadership was compelling and had the basis to inspire followers to go above and beyond expectations. According to their research, a transformational leader increases followers' desire for achievement and self-development while also fostering the growth of groups and organizations. These elements are (a) individual consideration, (b) intellectual stimulation, (c) inspirational drive, and (d) idealized influence, which are often referred to as the Four I's (Balyer, 2012;Dessalegn, Bekalu, & Frew, 2016;Leithwood, 1994). This was later brought in, adapted for use in a school context and was further refined (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2006).
According to Leithwood et al. (2004), theoretical framework for transformational school leadership, all leaders must strive toward boosting student academic achievement by setting direction, developing people, and reforming the organization. Principals have the most authority to transform low-performing schools into high-performing schools, thereby affecting all school's aspects. Transformational leadership is a leadership approach in which the leader upholds strong beliefs while also encouraging change inside the organisation by persuading employees to recognize needed change, establish a vision to drive the change through inspiration, and implement the change with their peers (Anderson, 2017;Day et al., 2009;Leithwood & Jantzi, 2008). While Hallinger (2003) puts that transformational leadership models conceptualise leadership as an organisational entity rather than a single individual's job. By moving from manager to instructional leader to transformational leader, Kythereotis et al. (2011) discovered that leaders with stronger leadership capabilities might influence a good learning outcome by migrating from manager to instructional leader to transformational leader. In support of the effective leadership skills notion, Leithwood and Jantzi (2008) have shown that transformational leadership positively impacts student outcomes in schools. As the name implies, transformational leaders transform a school from its current state to its ideal future state. Transformational leaders were crucial in transforming low-performing schools into high-performing schools (Jacobson, 2011). In contrast to the effectiveness of transformational leaders, Shatzer et al. (2014) in their study in comparing transformational leadership with instructional leadership, found out student's achievement are far better explained by instructional leadership, which contributed 45.4 percent improvement as compared to 29.0 percent by transformational leadership.
In Malaysia, since Malaysian teachers' innovative behaviour is indicated as moderate, a transformational leader is needed to inseminate innovation and invention as a culture in their respective school (Ismail & Mydin, 2019). Using creative and innovative methods, techniques, and teaching and learning tactics, an inventive teacher can produce new ideas and communicate the curriculum goals and demands. In conclusion, it is proposed that transformational leadership and commitment can boost teachers' innovative behaviour.

Situational Leadership
A common-sense, contingency-based leadership approach lies at the heart of the Situational Leadership Model. It consists of common leadership styles, which is Task-Directive Behaviour and Relation-Supportive Behaviour. It was first published in the 60s, has had numerous cosmetic and substantive revisions, and is now a restated set of prescriptive principles (Blanchard et al., 1993;Gates, Blanchard, & Hersey, 1976;Vecchio, 1987).
The present study has obtained evidence in support of the view that congruence in follower self-rating and leader rating is key to effective functioning of SLT. In improved revision of these theory follower self-rating becomes a critical mediator of the relationship between leader behaviour and effective function (Thompson & Glasø, 2018). The theory itself is quite old, and despite its popularity, it has yet to find a place in school environment. In spite of its widespread usage in leadership development and training, situational leadership has certain flaws. New teachers performed better under principals who had highly organized leadership styles, according to the majority of research conducted in schools (Fernandez & Vecchio, 1997;Vecchio, 1987). The first critique of situational leadership is that few research studies have explained its assumptions and propositions. Although the fact that numerous articles have addressed situational leadership dimensions, the majority of these research studies have yet to be published. The lack of a large corpus of research on situational leadership raises concerns about its theoretical foundation. Second, the notion of the mode of subordinates' development levels is ambiguous. The model's authors do not explain how commitment and competence are joined to generate four distinct levels of development (Shonhiwa, 2016).
Situational leadership in the educational setting is rare in the country today. In a study done, it was discovered that it usually infused with various types of leadership styles. In said study, situational leadership was found to be more appropriate during the early stages of school development, when an authoritarian style is required to manage a split workforce while also getting things done. Furthermore, it was emphasis by the principle in the study that just because she adhered to a broad set of values did not mean she would take a rigid leadership approach. When the circumstances call for it, she see the need to change leadership behaviours to meet the needs of the scenario, which may include the need to act in ways that are inconsistent with their underlying convictions (Chan & Shidu, 2009). To conclude, it is the principal's leadership style and capacity to match the school's environment or circumstances at different periods are important factors in this style.

Distributed Leadership
Distributed leadership is a theoretical and analytical approach to comprehending how leadership occurs among people and in the setting of a large organization (Spillane, 2005). Sociological, cognitive, psychological, and anthropological theories influenced the development of distributed leadership in the early 2000s. It was created as a theoretical and analytical framework for studying school leadership as an in-depth analysis of school leaders' practise, which is required to understand how school leadership functions (Miškolci, Armstrong, & Spandagou, 2016;Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2001). The approach contends that simply witnessing and describing leaders in action is insufficient. It must be followed by examine the conceptual framework that will be used to frame an examination of how leaders think and act. Thus, help teachers acquire a more distributed leadership practise view, which will likely have an impact on their academic success (Chang, 2011). As it found, both distributed cognition and activity theory theories, highlight how social context effects human interaction and learning. Human activity is spread in an interactive web of actors, artefacts, and the situation due to the interdependence of the individual and its environment (Spillane et al., 2001). It was further postulate that effective schools have greater alignment between leaders' and teachers' value norms and behaviours, which is more likely to lead to an improved academic achievement (Harris, 2008).
In practise, however, according to study conducted in Malaysia, senior teachers lack of confidence in making judgments and always rely on acceptance of their principles, despite the fact that they are empowered to make their own judgments when this kind of leadership is used. Teachers' competence, knowledge, experience, and willingness to hold leadership roles and responsibilities is another key challenge that principles face when allocating leadership (Tahir et al., 2016). As a result, we have some hesitation about applying this paradigm to our school's setting. Most research refutes the assumption that leadership may come from anyplace in the organization, which is a core component of distributed leadership. The majority of teachers still feel that all leadership must be hierarchical and subject to the principal's authority (Nikolaros, 2015).

Discussion
Numerous leadership theories are thought to impact students' achievements positively, for example, instructional leadership, transformational leadership, situational leadership, distributed leadership. All of it boils down to one resolve, when a leader acts in a certain way to convince teachers and students to modify their behaviour according to the organization's vision and mission while also reflecting positive results for academic achievements. In Malaysia, instructional leadership is still the most preferred strategy for leading schools to greatness. The Ministry of Education Malaysia suggests that school leaders act as instructional leaders who are actively involved in the development of teachers by planning, coordinating, and evaluating the teaching and learning (T&L) process in the school (Hassan et al., 2018). Existing models, on the other hand, were all established and perfected in Western contexts, raising issues about their applicability for ours. It also further noted that there is only limited research on this topic in the Malaysian context (Bush & Glover, 2014).
In other development, there is also a trend in the global setting that the need for leadership education theory to be unified. Recent research, such as Hallinger's, demonstrates this trend (Amanchukwu, Stanley, & Prince Ololube, 2015;Walker & Hallinger, 2015). Similar patterns were discerned via the thematic analysis of all the theories: first, influences on the principalship incorporating personal, cultural and political sub-themes. However, heavy discretion should be taken when integrating leadership theories. Of course, there is danger in simply combining leadership practices because practices may not be theoretically compatible. Simply adding a component to an existing model is also insufficient to support the pursuit of a completely new line of inquiry. Educational research may require the development of a new leadership model that can go beyond present theories and have a higher influence on student accomplishment than the present instructional and transformational leadership models that are relevant in our situations (Shatzer et al., 2014).
To add through what has already been discussed, leadership research has advanced from awareness development to psychological development, leadership traits research, and leadership behaviour research (Harung, Heato, & Alexander, 1995). This demonstrates how much leadership has evolved in recent years (Figure 1). As a result of this, the context for leadership in Malaysia should seek to be in sync with what has been done in the global arena by seeking to adopt the best practise in leadership. To increase the quality of our education rather than relying on a single model. Source: Harung, Heato, & Alexander (1995) As the literature analysis on school leadership shows, there is still a lack of data to back up their effectiveness in the field, at least in Malaysia. Moreover, even the much-touted instructional leadership is conceptualized as hierarchical, mainly focusing on the principals, whose role are highly prescriptive according to the Ministry of Education's policy (Bush et al., 2018). Based on the result, it is suggested that a different technique be used to address the lack of context in Malaysian leadership research.

Conclusion
To conclude, this is to suggest that a qualitative approach needs to be adopted to relate to whatever existing models we have and accommodate them to suit the Malaysian context. It will be the most effective way to draw on theory while ensuring that it is well-suited to the country's circumstances (Bush & Glover, 2014). Furthermore, by adopting a qualitative mindset, we are free of the need for a highly structured approach and avoid falling into the same pattern as previous leadership studies. Furthermore, qualitative methodologies are currently underutilized in the field of leadership. Instead, quantitative surveys have been the preferred way, despite the fact that the latter methodology fails to capture the immense variety of the leadership phenomena, leaving us with simply a set of highly abstracted and generalized characteristics (Conger, 1998). A leader can also take a comprehensive approach to school leadership by employing relevant systems-thinking concepts and principles of action. This will provide a stronger and broader practical framework for school leaders to use in various areas of everyday school life as they see fit.