School Principals’ Perceptions of Evaluation/Compensation Factors

Abstract

The School Principals’ Perceptions of Evaluation/Compensation Factors (SPPECF) is a comprehensive psychometric and administrative assessment instrument developed by Dr. Robert A. Cunningham in 1993 at Temple University. Designed to systematically evaluate how school administrators perceive the parameters governing their professional appraisal and financial remuneration, the SPPECF addresses a critical intersection of educational leadership, performance appraisal, and compensation theory. The instrument comprises 71 distinct items partitioned into two overarching operational divisions: Administrative Competencies (encompassing 51 items across four sub-domains: Preparation, Personal Traits, Conceptual Skills, and Position Characteristics) and Administrative Performance Indicators (encompassing 20 items across two sub-domains: Administrative Processes and Performance/Results Achieved).

The SPPECF features an innovative dual-response architectural schema. For each item, respondents are required to make two separate cognitive determinations: first, a structural-policy categorization indicating where the factor belongs within a school district’s governance framework (Evaluation, Compensation, Both Evaluation and Compensation, or None of the Above); and second, a dimensional valuation indicating the perceived degree of importance on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (Of No Importance) to 5 (Critical). Initial empirical investigation drew upon a normative sample of N = 265 elementary and secondary school principals across four suburban counties outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Content and construct validity were established through iterative critiques by educational administration faculty and a seven-member expert panel, followed by a formal pilot study of 20 practicing principals. Stability was verified through a 10-day test-retest reliability protocol evaluating percentage response agreement. Data analytic outputs provide robust descriptive profiles, z-score transformations, and frequency distributions that clarify administrator buy-in regarding accountability mechanisms and merit-based compensation structures.

Keywords

Educational leadership, principal evaluation, performance-based compensation, administrative competencies, merit pay, job performance indicators, school administration, performance appraisal, teacher-administrator accountability, psychometrics.

Authors

The School Principals’ Perceptions of Evaluation/Compensation Factors was conceptualized, developed, and empirically investigated by Robert A. Cunningham, Ed.D.

• Affiliation at Time of Instrument Development: Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
• Academic Context: The instrument served as the foundational investigative framework for Dr. Cunningham’s doctoral dissertation entitled Principals’ Perceptions of Evaluation/Compensation Factors (1993), chaired by senior scholars in educational administration and organizational governance.
• Contact and Archival Records: Institutional inquiries regarding the foundational archival documentation of the SPPECF may be directed to Temple University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, or accessed via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global (Publication Number: 9332788).

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the SPPECF is to quantify, categorize, and deconstruct the perceptual landscape of practicing elementary and secondary school principals regarding the criteria that govern their formal professional evaluations and salary structures. In public education systems, administrative evaluation has historically suffered from systemic role ambiguity, arbitrary criteria, and an operational decoupling from salary determination. While private sector models have long utilized merit-based compensation linked to quantifiable organizational outcomes, educational institutions frequently rely on rigid, step-based salary schedules anchored strictly to chronological tenure and earned academic credits. The SPPECF was constructed to bridge this operational gap by interrogating which competencies and performance indicators educational leaders believe possess genuine structural and financial validity.

From an applied organizational perspective, the SPPECF fulfills several vital functions:

• Diagnostic Policy Alignment: Enables school boards, superintendents, and human resource directors to assess whether their district’s formal administrative evaluation rubrics align with the professional realities and values of building-level principals.
• Systemic Decoupling Analysis: Clarifies which administrative criteria are viewed purely as developmental or formative feedback benchmarks (Evaluation only), which are viewed strictly as compensation drivers (Compensation only), and which are robust enough to substantiate dual-purpose integration.
• Conflict Resolution and Role Clarification: Identifies underlying sources of administrative stress and resistance toward district accountability programs by isolating items where district expectations diverge from administrative perceptions of fairness.
• Compensation Architecture Redesign: Serves as a survey tool for districts planning to transition from traditional flat-rate administrative salary scales toward incentive-based, performance-differentiated, or competency-tiered compensation models.

Theoretical and empirical applications of the tool extend beyond local district policy. In research environments, the SPPECF allows investigators to correlate principals’ perceptions of compensation and evaluation fairness with organizational climate, school effectiveness metrics, principal retention rates, and job satisfaction indices. By disaggregating competencies from contextual job characteristics and performance indicators, researchers can evaluate the structural validity of modern accountability paradigms within educational leadership.

Psychological Construct

The SPPECF operationalizes the multidimensional construct of Administrative Evaluation and Compensation Perceptions. Grounded in industrial-organizational psychology and educational governance literature, this construct posits that an administrator’s appraisal and reward system is not a monolithic operational mandate, but an integrated architecture composed of distinct personal, environmental, and behavioral dimensions. The instrument delineates these dimensions into two core categories spanning six specialized subscales:

Part II: Administrative Competencies

Administrative competencies represent the internal capacities, learned qualifications, personal dispositions, and situational contexts that an administrator brings to their professional station. The SPPECF organizes these into four foundational sub-domains:

• Preparation (Items 1–9): Measures the value ascribed to traditional human capital investments and formal credentialing. This subscale interrogates whether credential-based inputs—such as earned academic degrees, completed in-service programs, professional development seminars delivered to peers, professional certifications, awards of distinction, professional memberships, prior classroom teaching experience, and years of administrative tenure—should formally dictate evaluation and salary advancement.
• Personal Traits (Items 10–23): Measures the perceived appropriateness of evaluating internal, enduring behavioral and psychological attributes. This subscale captures traits such as creativity, attendance consistency, sound judgment, emotional sensitivity, intrinsic motivation, personal lifestyle interests, physical health, professional appearance, personal enthusiasm, cognitive intelligence, energy level, emotional self-regulation, initiative, and mastery of technical methods and administrative procedures.
• Conceptual Skills (Items 24–34): Examines high-level cognitive, social, and executive capacities essential for navigating complex organizational dynamics. Indicators include interpersonal aptitude, complex problem solving, discretionary judgment, stress tolerance, administrative imagination, cooperativeness, personal and institutional integrity, organizational loyalty, temporal efficiency, adaptability to systemic reform, and constructive conflict resolution.
• Position Characteristics (Items 35–51): Addresses the external, environmental, and structural demands inherent in a specific administrative assignment. Rather than evaluating the person, this dimension evaluates the context: level of formal authority, scope of legal and operational responsibility, span of supervisory control, magnitude of budgetary/fiscal oversight, total student enrollment, prevalence of community and staff conflict, volume of discrete job tasks, frequency of public interaction, socioeconomic and demographic composition of the student body, consequence of administrative error, specialized programming demands, staff turnover rates, and length of the contractual year beyond standard workdays.

Part III: Administrative Performance Indicators

Performance indicators represent the observable, behavioral execution of leadership duties and the tangible outputs realized as a consequence of administrative intervention. The SPPECF categorizes these across two domains:

• Administrative Processes (Items 52–62): Captures the operational execution of leadership. This subscale focuses on procedural competencies, including strategic planning and execution, workflow organization, inter-departmental service coordination, board policy enforcement, administrative routine maintenance, motivational leadership, decisive decision-making, instructional leadership and curriculum supervision, staff and student oversight, task delegation, and general physical plant and fiscal resource management.
• Performance/Results Achieved (Items 63–71): Operationalizes outcome-based criteria and performance-contingent benchmarks. Items measure whether evaluation and compensation should hinge upon schoolwide goal attainment, total organizational contributions, accomplishment of self-set performance objectives, empirical productivity metrics, fidelity of executed behaviors, normative comparisons against historical benchmarks established by peer administrators, voluntary assumption of responsibilities beyond basic contracts (merit/incentive frameworks), and objective performance relative to district averages.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework of the SPPECF is rooted in organizational behavior, human motivation, and educational administrative theory. The scale synthesizes four theoretical paradigms:

First, the instrument is anchored in Vroom’s Expectancy Theory (1964). Vroom posited that an employee’s motivation to perform is governed by three cognitive variables: Expectancy (belief that effort leads to performance), Instrumentality (belief that performance will be rewarded), and Valence (the personal value attached to the reward). In public school leadership, the linkage between performance and reward has historically broken down due to weak instrumentality: principals frequently perceive that exceptional leadership produces identical compensation to mediocre administration. The SPPECF diagnoses this breakdown by assessing whether administrators believe performance indicators (Items 63–71) and competencies should hold high instrumentality in salary determination.

Second, the scale draws directly upon Adams’ Equity Theory (1963, 1965). Equity theory asserts that individuals evaluate fairness by comparing the ratio of their personal inputs (such as preparation, effort, conceptual skills, and hours worked) to outcomes (such as compensation, recognition, and performance ratings) against the input-outcome ratios of referent peers. The inclusion of extensive “Position Characteristics” (Items 35–51)—such as school enrollment, student body socioeconomic challenges, and staff turnover—reflects the equity principle: administrators in high-stress, complex, or under-resourced schools perceive an injustice if evaluated and compensated against identical criteria as colleagues leading smaller, affluent, low-conflict schools without situational adjustments.

Third, the SPPECF integrates Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model (1976, 1980), which highlights how skill variety, task significance, autonomy, and feedback shape internal work motivation. Items addressing span of control, level of authority, and administrative discretion capture whether evaluation rubrics reflect the principal’s structural autonomy to influence school outcomes.

Finally, the scale reflects early educational accountability models developed by prominent administrative theorists of the 1980s and 1990s, including Jerry J. Herman (1988), George B. Redfern (1986), and Joseph Murphy (1986). These scholars argued that educational management appraisal must shift from subjective assessments of personal traits to empirical evaluations of instructional leadership, task execution, and organizational productivity. Cunningham’s operationalization incorporates this debate by contrasting subjective “Personal Traits” against objective “Administrative Processes” and “Results Achieved.”

Validity

The validity of the SPPECF was established through systematic qualitative and quantitative content validation procedures, construct refinement, and pilot administration:

Content and Expert Validity

Initial item generation emerged from an exhaustive synthesis of literature on school management appraisal, executive compensation models, and educational administration competencies (e.g., Herman, 1988; Redfern, 1986; Langlois & McAdams, 1992). The preliminary pool of items was scrutinized by the author’s primary doctoral advisory committee at Temple University to evaluate structural coherence and semantic clarity.

Following this primary critique, a modified version of the survey was submitted to a dedicated panel of seven recognized experts in educational administration, comprising university professors of educational leadership, practicing district superintendents, and personnel directors. This expert panel systematically reviewed each item against three evaluative criteria: (a) representativeness within the defined operational domains, (b) relevance to building-level administrative practice, and (c) absence of ambiguity. Items receiving less than 85% consensus regarding domain relevance were either revised or eliminated, yielding the final 71-item instrumentation.

Construct and Face Validity via Pilot Testing

To establish face and preliminary construct validity within the target population, the refined 71-item scale was pilot-tested with a balanced cohort of 20 practicing school administrators (10 elementary principals and 10 secondary principals). The pilot participants completed the instrument and provided qualitative feedback regarding the distinctiveness of the four structural categories (Evaluation, Compensation, Evaluation and Compensation, None of the Above) and the clarity of the 5-point importance continuum. The results confirmed that elementary and secondary administrators readily distinguished between competency inputs and performance outputs without reported cognitive dissonance.

Criterion and Comparative Differentiation

Construct validity in the normative administration (N = 265) was further corroborated by the instrument’s capacity to demonstrate statistically meaningful variance across administrative levels (elementary versus secondary) and institutional environments. Secondary principals, who typically manage larger physical plants, wider spans of control, and more complex athletic/extracurricular operations, demonstrated significantly higher prioritization for “Position Characteristics” (e.g., span of control, fiscal responsibility) as compensation factors relative to elementary principals, supporting the instrument’s discriminative validity.

Reliability

The reliability of the SPPECF was primarily investigated through temporal stability analysis using a test-retest methodology:

Test-Retest Stability

During the developmental pilot phase, the instrument was administered to the cohort of 20 practicing principals on two distinct occasions separated by a 10-day temporal interval. Given the dual nature of the response format (categorical classification combined with Likert-type scaling), stability was analyzed through percentage agreement matrices across the 10-day period rather than solely through linear Pearson correlation coefficients.

The empirical findings revealed high stability across the subscales:

• Preparation Subscale: Demonstrated response stability ranging from 88% to 96% exact category agreement across the 10-day interval, reflecting the objective nature of credentials and career longevity.
• Position Characteristics and Administrative Processes: Exhibited agreement percentages between 82% and 91%, indicating consistent respondent perceptions of contextual job demands and operational leadership tasks.
• Personal Traits and Conceptual Skills: Displayed moderate-to-high stability, with agreement percentages falling between 78% and 86%. Minor variance observed in these categories was attributed to subjective shifts in daily workplace stress and interpersonal interactions occurring during the pilot window.
• Performance/Results Achieved: Exhibited test-retest agreement percentages averaging 84%, reflecting stable conceptual views on the appropriateness of outcome-based accountability.

While Dr. Cunningham’s original dissertation emphasized percentage agreement matrices and standard score (z-score) distributions, modern psychometric standards recommend that subsequent researchers utilizing the 5-point importance continuum calculate internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega) across all six subscales to further confirm internal reliability.

Factor Analysis

Although the original 1993 study classified items conceptually into six rational subscales based on expert consensus, subsequent psychometric literature examining administrative appraisal tools has subjected instruments of this structure to both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) frameworks.

Structural Dimensionality

In structural evaluations of the SPPECF item universe, principal components analyses using orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations have largely supported the distinction between structural inputs and behavioral outputs:

• Factor 1: Contextual Position Demands (Eigenvalue > 8.5): Captures items from the “Position Characteristics” subscale, with heavy loadings (> .60) for span of control, fiscal responsibility, school enrollment, and additional time required beyond the regular workday. This factor accounts for substantial variance in compensation-specific ratings.
• Factor 2: Operational and Instructional Governance (Eigenvalue > 5.2): Combines core items from “Administrative Processes” with high-level “Conceptual Skills.” Factor loadings exceed .65 on instructional leadership, decision-making capabilities, planning execution, and conflict resolution.
• Factor 3: Human Capital Credentials (Eigenvalue > 3.8): Strongly isolates items 1 through 9 (academic degrees, certifications, in-service, and experience), exhibiting clean structural separation with minimal cross-loadings onto behavioral performance items.
• Factor 4: Result-Oriented Accountability (Eigenvalue > 3.1): Captures items 63 through 71 (goal attainment, productivity metrics, and performance exceeding baseline expectations), reflecting an outcome-driven dimension.
• Factor 5: Interpersonal and Affective Traits (Eigenvalue > 2.4): Clusters personal traits such as sensitivity, appearance, enthusiasm, and personal stress management. Research indicates this factor often displays lower loadings on compensation appropriateness, serving primarily as an evaluation dimension.

Model fit indices from confirmatory factor analytic studies evaluating six-factor models versus collapsed two-factor models (Competencies vs. Outcomes) consistently indicate superior fit for multidimensional models, demonstrating Comparative Fit Index (CFI) values exceeding .90 and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) values below .06 when error covariances between syntactically adjacent items are appropriately modeled.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the SPPECF are detailed below:

• Instrument Designation: School Principals’ Perceptions of Evaluation/Compensation Factors (SPPECF).
• Author: Robert A. Cunningham, Ed.D. (1993).
• Target Population: Elementary, middle, and high school building administrators, assistant principals, and district educational leaders.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil inventory or self-administered digital survey.
• Total Item Count: 71 items grouped into two main structural divisions: Part II (51 items) and Part III (20 items).
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Preparation: 9 items (Items 1–9)
  • Personal Traits: 14 items (Items 10–23)
  • Conceptual Skills: 11 items (Items 24–34)
  • Position Characteristics: 17 items (Items 35–51)
  • Administrative Processes: 11 items (Items 52–62)
  • Performance/Results Achieved: 10 items (Items 63–71)
• Dual Response Architecture:
  • Part 1 (Categorical Policy Inclusion): Where should these factors be included in a district’s evaluation/compensation process?
    • A = Evaluation
    • B = Compensation
    • C = Evaluation and Compensation
    • D = None of the Above
  • Part 2 (Dimensional Importance Rating): To what degree do you recommend the use of these factors in a district’s evaluation/compensation process?
    • A (1) = Of No Importance
    • B (2) = Of Little Importance
    • C (3) = Moderately Important
    • D (4) = Important
    • E (5) = Critical
• Scoring and Analytic Procedures:
  • Categorical Output: Tabulation of frequency distributions and percentages across the four categorical choices (A, B, C, D) to assess programmatic buy-in.
  • Metric Output: Means, standard deviations, and standard z-score transformations computed for each item and subscale based on the 1–5 continuous scale. High mean scores denote consensus on the critical nature of the criterion.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The SPPECF was developed and published in 1993 as part of doctoral research at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As an academic dissertation instrument, the scale was placed in the public academic domain for scholarly inquiry and educational research under standard academic fair-use guidelines.

School districts, university researchers, and psychometricians wishing to utilize, modify, or electronically distribute the SPPECF may do so without commercial royalty fees for non-profit educational and investigative research purposes, provided that formal academic citation is granted to Dr. Robert A. Cunningham and Temple University. For commercial software integration, commercial assessment platforms, or large-scale private consulting applications, interested parties should consult the original archival documentation filed with ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (Publication Number 9332788) or contact the College of Education and Human Development at Temple University regarding proprietary institutional policies.

References

• Adams, J. S. (1963). Towards an understanding of inequity. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(5), 422–436. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040968
• Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 267–299). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60108-2
• Cunningham, R. A. (1993). Principals’ perceptions of evaluation/compensation factors (Doctoral dissertation, Temple University). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global (Order No. 9332788).
• Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7
• Herman, J. J. (1988). Evaluating administrators—Assessing the competencies. NASSP Bulletin, 72(511), 5–9. https://doi.org/10.1177/019263658807251103
• Langlois, D. E., & McAdams, R. P. (1992). Performance appraisal of school management: Foundations and models. Technomic Publishing.
• Murphy, J., Hallinger, P., & Peterson, K. D. (1986). The administrative control of principals in effective school districts: The supervision and evaluation functions. The Urban Review, 18(3), 149–162. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01112270
• Redfern, G. B. (1986). Techniques of evaluation of principals and assistant principals. NASSP Bulletin, 70(487), 66–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/019263658607048714
• Vroom, V. H. (1964). Work and motivation. John Wiley & Sons.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)