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Abstract
The school counseling profession has evolved into a proactive profession in which school counselors should demonstrate the leadership necessary to foster students' academic, social/emotional, and career growth. While literature presents various frameworks for understanding school counselors' leadership roles and activities, transformational leadership emphasizes the leader's role in transforming the lives of those with whom they work as well as their work environments. This study explored the relationship between secondary school counselors' self-reported transformational leadership styles, as measured by the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire 5X (MLQ 5X), in traditional 9-12 grade public high schools in Douglas and Sarpy County, Nebraska and the frequency in which they participate in their actual and preferred counseling activities as measured by the School Counseling Activity Rating Scale (SCARS). Independent-samples t-tests were used to evaluate initial differences in actual counseling activities between school counselors with more or less self-reported transformational leadership. Four separate multiple linear regression analyses were then used to determine the unique contribution of each transformational leadership factor in predicting the SCARS subscale. The results suggested a difference in counseling and coordination activities between individuals with more and less transformational leadership. The results of this study did not indicate differences in consultation or curriculum activities between individuals with more or less transformational leadership. Understanding how a school counselor's transformational leadership style impacts the dynamics of a school counseling program will be useful to school administrators as well as school counselors who are involved in selecting, training, and evaluating school counselors. Based on these results, future research concerning school counselor leadership within the distributed leadership model should be conducted. Utilizing psychometrically sound instruments to further examine the leadership activities of school counselors working at school, district, and state levels is also recommended.
