PENGARUH GAYA KEPIMPINAN DAN PERSONALITI PENGETUA TERHADAP KEPUASAN KERJA GURU DI MAKTAB RENDAH SAINS MARA (MRSM) DI MALAYSIA

Abstract

A good principal’s leadership can create a positive culture and increase teacher job satisfaction and organizational effectiveness, which ultimately contributes to the progress of student achievement in schools. Therefore, the leadership style and personality of the principal are among the two main elements that involve issues in education as an initiative to look at increasing teacher job satisfaction and educational effectiveness in schools. There are several studies conducted either domestically or internationally related to the influence of leadership style and personality of organizational leaders on employee job satisfaction. However, there are still a few studies conducted on the influence of leadership style, principal personality and teacher job satisfaction at the MARA Junior Science College (MRSM). This study aims to examine the influence of dimensions in leadership style (consideration and initiating structure) and personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) as exogenous variables with teacher job satisfaction as an endogenous variable based on the perceptions of teachers at MRSM in Malaysia. Using a stratified random sampling method, this survey study was conducted involving (n = 398) study respondents, consisting of teachers at MRSM. The study data were analyzed using SPSS 27.0 to analyze descriptive statistics, while SmartPLS 4 was used to analyze the structural equation model (SEM). The descriptive study findings showed that all dimensions of the principal's leadership style and personality were high except for the low-level neuroticism dimension, and the study findings on teacher job satisfaction were high. The inferential study findings showed that the principal's leadership style had a significant direct influence on teacher job satisfaction (ß = 0.847, t =16.461, p = 0.001, CI = 0.739, 0.939). The same findings were also obtained on the principal's personality with teacher job satisfaction, which had a significant influence (ß = 1.42, t = 3.306, p = 0.001, CI = 0.065, 0.232). In addition, both predictor variables in this study had predictive relevance to the endogenous variables based on the Q2 value exceeding zero.