School districts are increasingly focused on instructional practice in classrooms. Many urban school districts have shifted decision-making responsibility to school principals in order to improve instruction. This reform strategy has been referred to as decentralization or school-based management. Decentralization has a significant influence on principal's human resource activities as it creates new opportunities for principals to recruit, hire, assign, support, and evaluate staff. Districts that have adopted a decentralized reform strategy have largely assumed that principals are equipped to deal with these new responsibilities. However, the uneven success of their reform efforts suggest this assumption may be inaccurate. In this study, I use a modified grounded theory design to explore how two, urban districts support principal's human resource activities. My analysis indicates that both districts make substantial investments in human resource support for school principals, have established an elaborate human resource function to assist and guide principal's human resource activities, and have both adopted a "customer-focused" human resource model. Yet principals indicate that these changes have not been completely effective. In fact, principals reported that encountered significant barriers when seeking support from human resources and identified conditions outside the human resource department that they believed influenced the human resource support they received. These conditions were primarily attributed to relationship the human resource department had with district instructional activities. The evidence also suggests that principals responded to the "gaps" in the support that they received from their district human resource department by creating tools which helped them connect human resource activities with their instructional leadership practice. These tools have important implications for the improvement of support for school principals as they suggest one mechanism districts might use to influence principal's practice. The tools also have implications for the preparation of principals and central office administrators as well as for efforts to provide powerful, equitable teaching and learning opportunities for all students. I conclude by discussing future research opportunities and methodological considerations. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]