Opinions of administrative staff on the culture of fear in state universities

This study was conducted to determine the views of the administrative staff working at state universities in Turkey on the culture of fear. In the study, the descriptive survey research approach, one of the quantitative research methods, has been used. In order to determine the fear culture levels of the administrative staff, the "Fear Culture in Schools" questionnaire developed by Çelik and Kahraman (2019) was used. This scale has been re-tested for the validity and reliability. The factor structure was confirmed. A five-point likert scale was used in the measurement tool. The population of the study consists of 169,322 administrative staff working at state universities in Turkey in the academic year of 2020-2021. In the sample group, a total of 928 administrative personnel, 308 women and 620 men, who voluntarily participated in the study, were included. Administrative staff was classified in four sub-groups: Senior Managers (General Secretary, Deputy Secretary of Secretary, President, Faculty / School / Institute Secretary, Administrative Amir, Coordinator), Moderate Managers (Branch Managers, Deputy Director of Branch Manager, Deputy President, Unit Responsor), Sub-Level Managers (Chef, Expert, Accounting official) and Employees (computer operator, data preparation and control operator, workers, technical personnel, and librarian, etc.). The convenience sampling method was used in the selection of the sample group. The level of 0.05 was based on their significance tests. In the analysis, t-Test for Unrelated Samples were used for the gender and marital status variables. As for the analysis of the professional seniority, educational status, title and geographic region variables, One-Way Analysis of Variance (One Way ANOVA) was used. There were significant differences in the fear of colleagues for the variables of gender, and geographical regions. There were, also, significant differences in the fear of legal process, and fear of colleagues for the variable of professional seniority. As for the variable of title, there were significant differences in the fear of manager, and colleague. However, there were no significant difference for the variables of marital status and educational status. As a result, it has been determined that administrative personnel working in higher education institutions feel sometimes the fear of administrators, rarely the fear of colleagues, and rarely the fear of legal process.