Abstract

This research aimed to develop the necessary leadership characteristics indicators of the secondary basic school administrators in Thailand. The samples were grouped into four including: (1) 10 specialists in the secondary educational administration, (2) 10 secondary school administrators of the educational quality assessment and its result with the best level, (3) 120 participants in the exploratory group and (4) 986 participants in the experimental group. The research instruments were the interview form and the questionnaires. The statistics for analyzing the data covered the descriptive statistics and the factor analysis. The exploratory factor analysis resulted in 5 factors and 51 indicators, as follows: 12 indicators of skills, 6 indicators of knowledge, 12 indicators of leadership, 11 indicators of characteristics, and 9 indicators of working style. A second order confirmatory factor analysis was administered using Mplus Version 7.2. The results showed that the construct validity of the factor analysis model was correlated with the empirical data at a relatively high level. Also, the necessary leadership characteristic having the highest factor value loading coefficient in decision making was leadership (ß =0.999), (R²= 0.998).

Key words: Leadership characteristics, indicators, secondary basic school.