Leader Decisiveness, Visionary Skill and Teacher Productivity in Public Secondary Schools in Southwest, Nigeria

This study investigated the relationship between school leaders’ decisiveness, visionary skill, and teacher productivity in public secondary schools in Southwest Nigeria. A descriptive survey research design was employed, targeting all public secondary school teachers across the six states in Southwest Nigeria. A total of 1,500 respondents from 75 public secondary schools were selected using a multistage sampling procedure. This involved random selection of three states, stratified selection of 25 local government areas, three schools per local government, and 20 teachers per school. One principal per school was purposively selected to provide assessments of teacher productivity. Data were collected using two self-designed instruments: the Decisiveness and Visionary Skill Questionnaire (DVSQ) and the Teacher Productivity Questionnaire (TPQ), both validated for content and face validity and tested for reliability, yielding coefficients of 0.89 and 0.83 respectively. Data analysis employed descriptive statistics to summarize respondents’ response and inferential statistics using Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation to test the hypotheses at 0.05 significance level. The findings revealed a significant positive relationship between school leaders’ decisiveness and teacher productivity, indicating that prompt and effective decision-making enhances teachers’ performance. In contrast, leaders’ visionary skill showed no significant relationship with teacher productivity. The study concludes that decisiveness is a critical leadership attribute for fostering teacher productivity, whereas visionary skill, while important for strategic planning, has limited immediate impact on instructional performance. Recommendations include implementing leadership training programs that emphasize decisiveness, establishing decision-making frameworks to guide timely actions, and translating long-term vision into actionable goals to support teachers in achieving both short-term and long-term educational objectives. Keywords: Teacher productivity, Decisiveness, Visionary Skill, Public secondary schools,