Research on causes of stress and stress management styles of primary and junior high school managers

This study has been conducted in order to provide general information about what could be done in stress management by specifying to what extent the primary and secondary education directors are affected by stressors in work environment, what the levels of stress are and how they affect work performance and revealing at what level the directors employ methods for coping with stress. Scanning model has been used, A general frame on the subject has been drawn after current literature scanning. In this quantitative study, data has been collected through scaling. In order to collect the data below, Pehlivan?s (1995) ?Stressors and Stress Management Scale in Education Management? has been used. This study has targeted school directors working in primary and secondary schools of İstanbul Directorate of National Education in 2012-2012 Academic Year. The study sample comprises all directors (137 directors including 42 principals, 15 general vice principals and 80 vice principals) who are on duty in primary and secondary schools of Beyoğlu District of İstanbul Province. Every school director has been interviewed online or face to face and scale has been applied on 130 school directors on voluntary basis. Descriptive statistical techniques have been used in data analysis. Frequency, percentage, average and standart deviation of the responses have been computed. The data have been analyzed by IBM SPSS 20.0 pack average program. Findings obtained through analysis have been put into charts and interpreted. The findings suggest that main stressord are insufficient wages, failure to yield results, having little authority, noisy working environment and long working hours while the most common stress symptoms have been found to be insomnia, tension and fatigue. Study findings reveal that stress is not highly influential on performance of directors. The method most frequently resorted to by school directors in coping with stress is focusing on the case and situation while ratio of other methos is quite low. Keywords: Stress, Organizations Stress, Stressor, Director, Identity