illustrated in Figure 3, teacher perceptions reported in all three dissertations yielded consistently
lower scores on all three dimensions of instructional leadership than principal self-ratings.
Consistent with the broader PIMRS literature (Hallinger, 2011a; Hallinger and Lee, 2013;
Hallinger et al., 2012; Hallinger and Murphy, 1985; Taraseina, 1993), this finding suggests that
principals’ self-report ratings are subject to inflation when compared to the perceptions of teachers.
More specifically, the results synthesized from these three studies indicated that principal selfreports
were an average of 17% higher than teacher ratings across the various dimensions.
If we extrapolate this finding to the 2008 dataset, it suggests that teacher ratings of the 491 principals
would have yielded significantly lower scores on all three dimensions. For example, this
could would have reduced the Mission and Climate ratings to a moderate level (that is,*3.5) and
the Instruction dimension to a relatively low level (*3.25) for this scale. These scores would have
indicated a substantially lower level of engagement in the role.