Leadership Styles of New Ireland High School Administrators

This yearlong ethnographic study of principals' leadership in Papua New Guinea high schools describes influences of imposing a bureaucratic school organization on principals' decision making in a communal society. Communal values of kinship relationships, wantok system, and "big men" leadership challenged principals' responsibility to uphold bureaucratic principles. Developing countries that impose Western infrastructures on traditional cultural systems may learn from the mismatch of structural processes and communal values that may distance communities from their schools. [Papua New Guinea schools, principals' leadership, communal values, school reform, bureaucracy] Papua New Guinea began implementing an educational reform program in 1994 to improve the quality of education for its people. Papua New Guinea's efforts are complicated because the nation is made up of separate groups of people whose cultures are very diverse and distinctively different. To develop an appropriate educational system for the entire nation requires a sound understanding of the local cultural contexts in which the system will be implemented. Reform initiatives typically emphasize the central role of leadership in delivering an effective educational system. Given Papua New Guinea's linguistic and cultural diversity, it is critical to understand ways that leadership practices are shaped and complicated by diverse local cultural systems and social organization. In the context of educational reform, this article reports findings from an exploratory ethnographic case study of the leadership styles among high school principals and deputy principals in the New Ireland Province of Papua New Guinea. Specifically this study investigated the ways in which these school administrators integrated influences from their traditional communal value base and the imposed bureaucracy of the national and provincial education departments. The study posed the following questions: While the high schools operate under an imposed bureaucratic structure, do traditional leadership styles carry over into the school organization? If so, what impact do communal values have on leadership styles or practices in a modern school organization? We begin by outlining the study's theoretical underpinnings and then provide an overview of the cultural and educational systems of Papua New Guinea. Next, we discuss how local communal values of New Ireland societies, specifically kinship relationships, the wantok system, and the big men leadership ideology, impact leadership