Predicting self-efficacy of secondary school principals through their style of humor

Abstract

The present study aimed to explain style of humor as a predictor of self-efficacy among secondary school principals. The research method was descriptive-correlational and 103 principals were selected by stratified random sampling proportionate to size. Data was collected from two questionnaires; Martin’s Humor Style and Tschannen-Moran and Gareis’s Self-Efficacy Questionnaire. Validity of the questionnaire was estimated using Cronbach's alpha coefficient that determined evaluations of 0.80 and 0.74, for content and reliability respectively. Pearson Correlation Coefficient and Stepwise Analysis were used for data analysis. In general, results in showed no statistically significant relationship between humor and self-efficacy. However, there was a significant positive relationship between effectiveness of principals in management, educational leadership and ethical leadership with affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles and the strongest relationship was observed between promoting humor style with self-efficacy in educational leadership (r = 0.411). Another finding of this study was that self-enhancing and affiliative humor styles were able to predict 17.7 percent of variance in self-efficacy of the principals.