Although much of the current school reform movement relies on the basic assumption of effective elementary school administration, insufficient effort has been made to synthesize key concepts found in organizational theory and management studies with relevant effective schools research findings. This paper attempts such a synthesis to help develop a clearer concept of elementary school principalship effectiveness. Following some definitions of key terms, the paper presents several concepts from organizational/management theory, including the Getzels-Guba Model of Organizational Social System Functioning, Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs, and Glickman's Paradigm of Teacher Categories. These concepts are then correlated with relevant effective schools research findings, such as Edmonds's five correlates, Purkey and Smith's nine characteristics of effective schools, Salganick's profile of the strong principal, and Dwyer's characteristics of effective principals. Finally, some mnemonics for elementary school principal effectiveness are outlined. (24 references) (MLH)