International Journal of Education, Learning and Development Vol.7, No.4, pp.1-15, April 2019 ___Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK (www.eajournals.org) 1 HOW COULD LEADERSHIP CONTRIBUTE TO THE TRANSFORMATION OF A SCHOOL UNIT INTO A LEARNING ORGANIZATION? Dr Zoe Karanikola, Constantine Zogopoulos and Dr Georgios Panagiotopoulos Technological Educational Institution of Western Greece ABSTRACT: This study attempts to explore primary school teachers’ perceptions regarding the contribution of leadership to the transformation of schools into learning organizations. The results show that leadership can play a significant key role in the transformation of schools and there is a positive correlation between school leadership practices and its functioning as a learning organization. KEYWORDS: learning organization, leadership, schools, quantitative methodology. INTRODUCTION The rapid development of information and communication technology has made innovation and change necessary for all organizations, including schools. The future school seems to be heading towards a learning organization. Many Dutch schools have already started operating based on the principles of learning organizations, while simultaneously many theorists argue that there is a strong need for transforming all schools into learning organizations (Argyris and Schön, 1978; Popper and Lipshitz, 2000; Senge, 1990; Smith, 2012). In addition, the significant contribution of leadership to the development of a learning organization has been widely recognized (Robbins and Judge, 2009). There is strong evidence that supportive leadership is positively associated with organizational learning (Montes et al., 1999; Montes et al., 2005; Swiering and Wierdsma, 1992) and innovation (Montes et al., 2005). Leaders can play an active role in the process of transforming schools, inspiring teachers to develop creativity, adopting new ways of thinking, enhancing group learning (Bass and Avolio, 2006) and facilitating teachers to develop and promote innovative actions (Chanlin et al., 2006). Towards this direction, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2016) stresses the need for schools to be able to learn at a higher rate and teachers to become knowledge workers in order to be able to cope with rising changes and needs. Despite the fact that the implementation of a learning organization in the field of schools is relatively recent, there are extensive bibliographic reports on this issue. Though, there are not enough empirical studies and researches in the international field which could illustrate today's reality in schools and especially the way organizational learning should be implemented (Fullan, 2000; Silins et al., 2002). Relative surveys in Greece are even fewer (Vassiliadou and Dieronitou, 2014; Georganta, 2009; Kalatzi, 2017; Papadopoulos, 2017; Papazoglou, 2016 and Tagari, 2017).