Measuring educational leadership in Singapore: re-examining the psychometric properties of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire

John Chee Keng Wang; Woon Chia Liu; Ying Hwa Kee; Betsy Ng; Lilian Chua; Liang Hu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1280038

Measuring educational leadership in Singapore: re-examining the psychometric properties of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire

Front Psychol. 2023 Nov 17:14:1280038. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1280038. eCollection 2023.

Authors

John Chee Keng Wang¹, Woon Chia Liu¹, Ying Hwa Kee¹, Betsy Ng¹, Lilian Chua¹, Liang Hu²

Affiliations

¹ National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
² Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.

Abstract

Introduction: The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X) has been used frequently to assess leadership in different settings. Despite its popularity, there are many critiques of the MLQ-5X such as its questionable multidimensional structure, lack of connection to the theory and the different factor structures of the measurement tool. The purpose of this study was to re-examine the psychometric properties of the MLQ-5X in the Singapore educational context using two datasets.

Methods: A total of 872 teachers (40.1% male and 59.9% female) from 20 secondary schools in Singapore completed two sets of MLQ-5X, one set for their immediate reporting officer and one set for their school leaders.

Results: Congeneric Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Rho's coefficients, and AVE were used to analyze MLQ-5X's convergent validity and internal consistency. After five items were deleted, the MLQ-5X showed acceptable internal consistency and convergent validity. Eight measurement models were tested with the original 36 items and the reduced items MLQ-5X. Latent factor correlation matrix with confidence intervals was used to assess the discriminant validity of the MLQ-5X. The results provided support for a nine first-order factors and three second-order factors model (transformation [IIA, IIB, IM, IS, IC, CR], transactional (MBEA), and non-leadership (MBEP and LF).

Discussion: The discriminant validity of the hierarchical measurement model of MLQ-5X is supported using dataset 2.

Keywords: MLQ-5X; congeneric CFA; convergent validity; discriminant validity; transformational-transactional leadership.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This project is funded by the Education Research Funding Programme of the Ministry of Education, Singapore (OER 12/19 LWC).