Teacher Leadership: Charismatic Characteristics of Sri Lankan School Teachers

This study identifies a number of charismatic leadership characteristics of school teachers in Sri Lanka. Since charisma is an instrumental asset in any work context, leaders’ charismatic characteristics can make extraordinary effects on follower toward mission accomplishment. In the teaching-learning context, teachers are viewed as great leaders that make magnificent transformations in the students. A teacher becomes the leader in the classroom as well and they are playing a significant role to build a culture of learning in the classroom that, finally everyone benefits. Therefore charismatic leadership characteristics in teachers as leaders can make the teaching-learning process more and more effective. This study followed a qualitative research approach, collecting data from interviewing twenty school teachers. It was reported that most of the school teachers are leaders with charismatic characteristics such as mission formulation for the students, unconditioned commitment towards the students’ accomplishments, trust on the students, taking personal risk in directing students, demonstration of unusual behaviors and emotional arousal through attractive communication. The implication of this study is imperative for teacher training and performance appraisals.Keywords: Teacher leadership, charismatic leadership, teaching-learning process, school teacher

Leaders for the Banking Industry: An investigation on effective leadership.

Leadership is critical in achieving performance and yet not exhausted, keeping scholars to uncover more findings on effective leadership styles. This study expected to identify the effective leadership style for enhanced employee performance in the banking industry in Sri Lanka. The banking industry has a unique work environment that stresses performance targets, long working hours, and error-free transactions while making the customers happy. Thus, leadership is a critical stimulus that this study focused on. The findings illustrate that transformational leadership style is the most present style among the bankers in Sri Lanka, and employee performance is above average with transformational leaders. Overall, scores in the transformational leadership style were found to be strongly correlated with employee performance. The results suggest that supervisors in the banking sector need to use a lot of transformational leadership behaviours or rather embrace a transactional leadership style. The implications of the study are significant in HR practices like recruiting and training managers as leaders in the banking sector.Keywords: leadership style, transformational leadership, MLQ, transactional leadership, employee performance)