Primary school assistant teacher in the school of organizational trust level on the perception

Societal problems such as economic depression, cold war, terrorism, unemployment cause loss of trust in people. This distrustful environment harms individual and societal relationships, and thus, negatively influences the organizational performance, which is a part of the society.Trust is the belief that a person would exhibit altruist attitudes, good will to another one and would respond to the needs of the other. When personal relations are based on mutual trust, understanding, tolerance and helpfulness are observed in that relationship. In such an ambit, it could be stated that people draw on their energies for more positive undertakings.Trust in societal, organizational and individual life is one of the issues with increasing eminence. The phenomenon of trust is also one of the crucial elements of the educational organizations in which the aim is to cause desired behavioral changes in individuals. In this respect, establishing organizational trust in schools as educational organizations could have positive impacts specifically on the performance of the school and the relationships between the school staff, and individual and societal life, in general.The aim of this research is to determine the level of organizational trust of the teachers employed in elementary schools towards their schools in order to develop suggestions for increasing trust in school organizations based on these results.The population of this descriptive research based on survey method is composed of 2940 teachers employed in 75 official elementary schools in the Central District of the city of Malatya during 2008 2009 academic year. 413 teachers employed in 23 official elementary schools constitute the sample of this research.In order to measure the organizational trust perception of the elementary school teachers, the research made use of a scale developed on purpose. The data gathering tool was the ?Organizational Trust in Schools Scale?, a Likert scale developed by Daboval et al. (2004) and adapted to Turkish by Yılmaz (2005).The first part of the scale is composed of questions about the gender, seniority, previous education and branch of the elementary school teachers participating in the research. The second part includes 40 questions aimed at measuring the organizational trust perception of the elementary school teachers. The scale is constructed as: Completely agree (5), Strongly agree (4), Somewhat agree (3), Barely agree (2), Disagree (1).The statistical analyses calculated frequency distribution of each dependent and independent variable in the scale, arithmetical means, total mean points, standard deviation and percentages. Analysis of Variance was used to determine the relationships between the variables and ?Tukey b? test was conducted with the variables that exhibited significant difference in these comparisons.In line with the sequence of the sub questions of the research, the following results were obtained.1.The elementary school teachers? trust towards the school organization is ?Strong? ( =3.66).2.The level trust of the participant elementary school teachers towards the school organization shows significant difference in sub-dimensions of organizational trust.The level of teachers? trust in the school organization regarding the organizational trust sub dimension Sensitivity to Employees is ?Somewhat? ( =3.39).In the sub-dimension Trust in the Manager, the teachers trust level for the school organization is ?Strongly? ( =3.86).The elementary school teachers? trust for their school in Communication Environment sub-dimension is ?Strongly? ( = 3.85).For what regards the Openness to Innovation sub-dimension of organizational trust, the teachers ?Somewhat? ( =3.40) feel trust for the schools they are employed in.The teachers? trust for the school organization is lower in Sensitivity to Employers and Openness to Innovation, whereas higher in Trust in the Manager and Communication Environment.3. In terms of gender variable, the teachers? trust in the school organization demonstrates significant difference in the organizational trust sub-dimensions. In this respect, for the organizational trust sub-dimensions Openness to Innovation (female: =3.58; male: =3.34) and Trust in the Manager (female: =3.95; male: =3.74) female teachers have higher trust than the male teachers.4. There is a significant difference in the level of the teachers? trust in the school organization for the organizational trust sub-dimensions in terms of branch variable.The teachers? organizational trust in the sub-dimension Sensitivity to Employers is lower among those with the social sciences branch ( =3.21), while higher among those with the classroom teacher branch ( =3.48).In terms of Openness to Innovation sub-dimension, the level of the teachers? organizational trust towards their schools is higher among classroom teachers ( =3.56), and lower among those with social sciences branch ( =3.23).The teacher?s level of trust in Communication Environment sub-dimension is lower for teachers with social sciences branch ( =3.65), whereas higher for other branch teachers (classroom teacher: =3.90; fine arts and sport: =3.93; mathematics and science: =3.94). Thus, in Communication Environment sub-dimension, the teachers with social sciences branch trust less in their organization compared to the other branch teachers.Regardless of the dimension differentiation, the level of organizational trust among the participant teachers is lower among those with the social sciences branch ( =3.46), while it is higher among the teachers with other branches (classroom teacher: =3.74; fine arts and sport: =3.66; mathematics and science: =3.71). Hence, social sciences teachers have a lower level of trust in the schools they are employed in compared to the teachers with other branches.5. The participant teachers? level of trust towards the schools they are employed in terms of the organizational trust sub-dimensions does not show a There a significant difference regarding the schools they were graduated from. Thus, the level of organizational trust is the same both for the graduates of faculty of education and the others.6. In terms of the seniority variable, the teachers? trust in the school organization significantly differs in the organizational trust sub-dimensions.The participant teachers? level of trust in the sub-dimension Sensitivity to Employers is lower for teachers with 6-10 year seniority ( =3.15), whereas higher for teachers with more than 20 years seniority ( =3.57).Regardless of the sub-dimension, the level of trust in the school organization is higher among the teachers with more than 20 years seniority ( =3.79), and lower among teachers with other seniority years (1 5 year seniority: =3.60; 6 10 year seniority: =3.55; 11 15 year seniority: =3.48; 16 20 year seniority: =3.73). Therefore, the teachers with more than 20 years of seniority trust more in the organization they are employed when compared to the teachers with other seniority orders.