From Simple to Complex: The Relationship Between Educational Leaders' Cognitive Complexity and Leadership-Style Profiles.

This innovative study examines the relations between principals' cognitive complexity (CC) levels and their leadership-style profiles. Participants were 341 principals and 3,209 teachers in Israel. Results indicated four leadership-style profiles: transformational; mixed – including transformational and transactional; transactional; and passive-avoidant. School principals were further found to juggle their perspectives from simple to complex, resulting in passive-avoidant to transactional, to transformational and to mixed leadership profiles. The mixed leadership-style profile (transactional and transformational) was characterized by high CC, and construed social behavior in a multidimensional way; passive-avoidant leadership was characterized by simple thinking (low CC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]