Date of Degree
2024
Degree Name
Ed.D. (Doctor of Education)
Department
Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology, and Foundations (LEPF)
Director
Roberts, Patrick
Committee Members
Gibson, Lynn; Tonks, Stephen
Keywords
School Board, Superintendent, School Board Leadership, School Board Governance, Trust, Communication, Roles
Abstract
Effective superintendent and school board leadership teams are positioned to create learning conditions that promote student success. Research emphasizes that effective district leadership teams and school board relations directly correlate with improved student outcomes. Understanding the communicative relationships between school board members and superintendents as well as their perceptions of trust and role responsibilities will support leadership teams’ ability to effectively lead their school districts. Communication and mutual trust amongst team members is essential to fostering a strong collaborative environment.
The purpose of this research is to better understand how communicative relationships, trust, and role responsibilities support effective leadership. Following the introduction in Chapter 1, the study is divided into three parts. Chapter 2, the comprehensive literature review, examines current research on school board relationships, governance, trust, and role responsibilities. Chapter 3 reports on an empirical study that analyzes the perspectives of six school superintendents and five school board presidents from Illinois on communicative relationships, trust, role responsibilities, and effective leadership and the connection to sociological theories. Finally, Chapter 4 utilizes the findings from Chapter 3 to provide superintendents, school board members, and professional organizations with recommendations for building strong communicative relationships, trust, and a mutual understanding of the role responsibilities of the superintendent and school board members. This includes recommendations that support future research on the valuable insights that identity theory may provide school board leadership teams.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publisher
Northern Illinois University
Rights Statement
In Copyright
Rights Statement 2
NIU theses and dissertations are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors, unless otherwise indicated.
Recommended Citation
Blume, Jason, "BUILDING EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATIVE RELATIONSHIPS: UNDERSTANDING SUPERINTENDENT AND SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER PERCEPTIONS OF TRUST AND ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES" (2024). Dissertations of Practice. 52.
https://huskiecommons.lib.niu.edu/allgraduate-disspractice/52
