Effects of Entrepreneurial Characteristic of Public and Private School Principals on Evaluation of Innovativeness

The Ministry of Education has started extensive efforts in order to enhance innovation in schools so that staff structure and planning as well as management and scheduling of cultural and educational capacity of schools are better aligned with the aforementioned objective. The goal of the present study is to investigate entrepreneurial Characteristics of educational managers and its effects on the innovativeness of school organization. In this study pragmatism, creativity, risk, challenge seeking and ambiguity tolerance are considered as characteristics of entrepreneurial Characteristics of school principals. Our research methodology is causal-comparative and the population includes 100 Tehran school principals during 1389-1390 (2010-2011) educational year. In this study which investigates one main hypothesis and four sub-hypotheses, other characteristics such as gender, educational background of school principals and ownership status of schools (being private or state owned) are also examined. For data collection purposes, a Characteristics of Iranian Entrepreneurs Questionnaire with a reliability score of 0.94 and a questionnaire for measuring innovation are utilized. Our data analysis phase makes use of the Independent Samples T test as well as Pearson correlation coefficient. Our findings indicate that factors such as ownership status of schools and challenge seeking traits are significantly related to the innovativeness of school organizations. Therefore it is recommended to take steps toward increased decentralization of the educational system and greater consideration of organizational entrepreneurship in the body of education and training organization. Also it is suggested that having more flexible and dynamic planning allows for better capitalization on personal entrepreneurial characteristics of educational managers