Ubuntu-Inspired Principals’ Leadership Styles: A Conduit for Effective and Ethical Knowledge Management Practices in Under-Resourced South African Public Schools

Abstract

This study focuses on locating a leadership style that upholds the ethos of Ubuntu (a culturally embedded African philosophy of collective personhood and caring for one another in communal and professional spaces of people’s social interactions) and the creation of an organisational climate that is conducive to effective and ethical knowledge management (KM) practices in under-resourced public schools. Having borne in mind that the knowledge economy implies that all sectors, including the schooling system, need to treat organisational knowledge as a precious commodity, the study looked at how three schools leveraged KM in their daily operations. This study offers an in-depth analysis of views expressed by 20 participants (including teachers, principals, heads of departments (HODs) and administrative clerks) concerning the principals’ facilitation of KM practices in their respective schools. From the three leadership styles that were purportedly employed by the selected principals, the study selected the one that complements Ubuntu practices more than the rest. This social constructivist-inclined qualitative inquiry found that a democratic (or participatory) leadership style is more people centred and effective enough to moderate a) the pervasion of authoritative undertakings associated with the inherently top-down school organogram; b) hostile relations between subordinate and superior staff; and c) low participation of teachers and administrative clerks in decision-making processes. Some aspects of the findings explicated that both the laissez-faire and transactional leadership styles somewhat fell short of invoking among principals the morale for consistently sustaining multiparty dialogue and collective decision making as a measure to unite staff behind a common vision. Therefore, the study recommends that principals should be urged to consciously consider the extent to which their approaches to school leadership might espouse democratic virtues and promote a distributive sense of duty among all role players in the KM ecologies of these schools.