ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Leadership in Education
This article is part of the Research TopicEducational Leadership and Sustainable DevelopmentView all 25 articles
THE INFLUENCE OF STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP ON INNOVATION CAPACITY AND DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING IN OMANI SCHOOLS
Provisionally accepted
- 000000, 000, Saudi Arabia
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This study aimed to identify the reality of strategic leadership, innovative ability, and data-driven decision-making in Omani schools. It also aimed to reveal the impact of leadership on innovative ability and data-driven decision-making in Omani schools. The study population consisted of all principals and teachers in government schools in the Sultanate of Oman. The study sample included (225) teachers for quantitative data collected via a questionnaire and (5) principals for qualitative data collected via interviews. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative methods, and used questionnaires and interviews as data collection tools. The study concluded that the reality of strategic leadership, innovative ability, and data-driven decision-making in Omani schools was at a high level, with arithmetic means of (3.85, 3.76, and 3.65) respectively. The research also found a statistically significant impact of strategic leadership on the ability to innovate. The results indicated that strategic leadership accounted for 78.4% of the variance in innovative ability, as evidenced by the coefficient of determination (R²). Furthermore, the impact of strategic leadership on data-driven decision-making was statistically significant, explaining 70.6% of the variance in data-driven decision-making, as measured by the R². The study recommended designing specialized training programs for school leaders to equip them with strategic thinking skills, problem-solving abilities, and change management skills.
Keywords: Data-driven, data-driven decision making, Innovation capacity, Omani schools, strategic leadership
Received: 28 Aug 2025; Accepted: 05 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Al Muqbali. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Amal Al Muqbali
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.