Leadership and Motivation of School Employees Essay

Effective organizational management is contingent on top management's ability to initiate measures that guarantee enhanced working relationship between workers and managers for greater productivity. Good leadership and motivation are two important tools that top management can use to boost commitment and productivity among school library workers, school teaching staff, and the school administration. It is vital to note that motivation directs and triggers human behavior to attain a particular goal. Moreover, it stimulates employees to maximize their potential and achieve exemplary results. On the other hand, leadership entails performing actions that improve organizations through specific initiative implementation, positive motivation and modeling, and so on. Typically, motivation and leadership are influential tools that improve productivity of librarians, teachers, and administrators within a school setting which in turn enhance the performance of the school.

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Motivation and leadership are inseparable tools needed to enhance productivity of human resource (Alonderiene & Majauskaite, 2016). Motivation is required in education to promote and preserve skills, attitude, and knowledge to ensure survival in the competitive world. Imperatively, motivation is action-based, and it is associated with actions like learning a new thing, rehearsing a given skill, or accomplishing a task. According to Goldman (2015), the first step towards motivation is desire, which has two crucial variables that influence it: direction and value perception. The direction variable includes an individual's concept and the things that an individual purposes to achieve. On the other hand, value perception refers to the value that a person places on a given action. The next step towards achieving motivation is hope. It is essential that hope is dependent on two variables: support and self-efficacy. An individual's opinion about task accomplishment is referred to as self-efficacy. Support variable, on the other side, helps in sustaining and fostering hope and includes modeling, coaching, and encouragement. The last step is the actual action that results from motivation.

Motivation helps to foster wellbeing of human beings in their working environment. Zepeda (2013) elucidates that motivation is critical in the administration of various personnel within a school as well as the learning and teaching process. It sustains and stimulates interest of various educational stakeholders in education as no meaningful education can occur without it. The ramification of motivation is an efficient and quality performance of employees, leading to the attainment of organizational goals. It is worthy to understand that motivation involves encouraging the willingness to acquire or learn new knowledge aimed at attaining a given outcome for a particular audience. Thus, motivation differs from one individual or group to the other as different groups of people have distinct goals, personalities, and needs. In a school set-up, school library employees, the teaching staff, and even administrators require different forms of motivation (Alonderiene & Majauskaite, 2016). Each employee requires a distinct motivational need to enhance the provision of efficient services that in the long-run supports effective learning in schools.

Libraries are important facilities in a school as they provide students and teachers with reading resources such as books, journals, magazines, and periodicals among others that improve their knowledge and skills. According to Johnston (2017), school librarians can provide leadership role through technological integration. Through their leadership, they need to continually evolve and integrate new technologies as well as proactively providing support through learning and teaching. They, therefore, need to embrace instructional partnerships to forge greater opportunities to both teachers and students. As leaders in their fields, school librarians assume administrative, instructional, and professional leadership responsibilities. School librarians can support the principal by sharing their passion and knowledge aimed at empowering tutors to lead in technological use for teaching. Thus, due to the importance that library has in a school system, it is imperative to motivate library staff so that they can deliver quality services to various stakeholders. Also, the top management needs to complement, promote, or appreciate library staff.

A good school library leadership ensures each teacher receives informal or formal training, mentoring, or coaching depending on the needs of respective teachers to ensure that the stakeholders are sharp, ready, able, and motivated to work. Through this, teachers and students can acquire knowledge on technology platforms and pedagogical strategies required to integrate resources and technologies for academic improvement. As a leader, a practicing librarian is expected to not only plan but also implement a high quality staff development. Furthermore, school management, under the stewardship of the principal, need to set time and know career goals that each library staff has and make efforts in helping the staff to achieve them (Chance, 2013). Consequently, this will make them feel cared for, a situation that will improve and retain their loyalty, hence improved productivity and dedication to their work. Through their leadership, school librarians can design library programs aimed at positively influencing student learning outcome. They are, therefore, critical in providing students with the needed opportunity to learn and excel academically. A study by Montgomery (2014) reveals that library programs that are effective enable students to learn more, and score higher grades than their counterparts whose school librarians do not have effective programs. The expertise of school librarians on technology and leadership positively impact student achievement by motivating them to explore more.

Teachers are important stakeholders within a school. They teach, guide, and motivate students to excel in academics and to be socially and morally responsible. In this regard, they need to be empowered and motivated to positively influence students to achieve better results (Whitaker, Whitaker, & Lumpa, 2013). Principals need to adopt transformational leadership when dealing with teachers and to address their affairs. Transformational leadership is prudent in a school set-up as it ensures mutual respect among school stakeholders. In addition, it inspires human resources within a school to work together and motivate each other irrespective of the rank that exist within the set-up. Further, it improves the performance of employees through mentorship and coaching programs. Transformational leadership will, therefore, make teaching staff to surpass their expectation by motivating them to identify with the principal and develop collective visions and goals for the school.

There are many ways of motivating teaching staff in a school so that they can realize their true potentials. One of the ways is by making themselves accessible and available should teachers need their services (Whitaker et al., 2013). It is important to pinpoint that they should offer help to teachers who have a larger workload. However, they should consider asking them if they need help before lending them a hand to eliminate the feeling of being micromanaged. Another way to motivate teachers is to praise them publicly. By so doing, they will feel valued and rejuvenated to deliver beyond their potential. Additionally, school administrators need to make a budget that incorporates small gifts to be given to teachers who have achieved exemplary performance to motivate and encourage them to do better. The budget also serves to buy small gifts to teachers who volunteer to do extra work in a classroom or extra-curricular activities such as coaching students in soccer. It is important to note that intrinsic rewards to teachers help achieve teacher satisfaction. Studies have shown that altruism can motivate people to enter into the noble teaching profession (Azman, 2013). School leadership that encourages teachers to work together in a purposeful and meaningful manner helps in achieving teacher retention since teachers feel supported and valued in their work.

As a way of motivating teachers, it is vital for administrators to provide professional development opportunities to them such as workshops, conferences, and seminars among others. Fullan (2014) explains that these opportunities will enable teachers to interact with other colleagues from other institutions, thereby sharing important knowledge and teaching skills that are helpful to them and students. Additionally, good leadership of a school's top management should give tutors a voice through involving them in the school's important decision-making processes. Moreover, school management should initiate and encourage teachers to attend open-door meetings and listen to the issues being addressed even if the subject to be discussed in the meeting does not directly concern them. Through this initiative, they will feel valued and motivated to achieve the school vision and goals. School management can also encourage collaboration between teachers in a school. This strategy enables younger teachers to learn from experienced teachers, which helps in improving their teaching skills.

School principals have been on intense scrutiny over the past decades as researchers have tried to establish effective leadership of principals and their impact on students' learning. Researchers contend that a good school leadership entails setting direction, redesigning the organization, and developing people (Thomas, Herring, Redmond, & Smaldino, 2013). It is worthy to note that rarely are the aforementioned practices sufficient for school principals aiming to enhance students' academic performance significantly. However, without them, not much would be achieved as far as improved performance of students is concerned. According to Thomas et al. (2013), principals or school administrators who set direction to the institution they manage impact greatly on the performance of their staff members and students. They help to develop a sense of shared understanding among staff members, which motivates them to achieve organizational vision or purpose. It is essential to pinpoint that to set direction for a school entails development of a school improvement plan.

School administrators develop their staff members through instructional leadership and emotional intelligence. Through instructional leadership, they provide guidance tailored towards improving the teachers' classroom practice. In their research, Dipaola and Hoy (2013) pinpoint that instructional leadership entails defining the mission of the school, instructional program management, and promotion of favorable learning climate. On the other hand, leaders require emotional intelligence to tune in employees to have the same willingness and ability to improve the school as them. As a leader, a school administrator can achieve emotional intelligence through paying personal attention to staff members. It can also be achieved through employee capacity utilization, increasing employee optimism and enthusiasm, and reducing employee frustration. Thus, school leadership should develop employees by stimulating them intellectually, offering them individualized support, and presenting them an appropriate motivation model that improves their performance.

Conclusion

Administrators should provide individualized support that encompasses model lessons by math or literacy coaches, providing constructive feedback, and so on. They should also hold debriefing sessions with teachers as well as encourage peer observations. Ble...