The relationship between the bureaucratic structures of elementary schools and organizational socialization levels of school teachers

This research aimed to determine whether there has been a meaningful relationship between the perceptions of elementary school teachers about their schools? bureaucratic structures and perceptions of them about their organizational socialization levels and also aimed to determine whether their perceptions changed according to the variables such as sex, teachers? subject, work experience and school size.This research was designed both in correlational and survey model. The population of the research comprises 3286 teachers working in the state elementary schools within the central district of Malatya province during the 2010-2011 educational year. The sample of this research included 398 elementary school teachers selected according to the stratified sampling method. Schools were layered according to their sizes. (The number of students in those schools 1-500, 501-1000, 1001-1500, 1501 and above) Necessary data for the research was gathered by using ?Organizational Socialization Scale? developed by the researcher and ?Enabling School Structure Scale? developed by Hoy and Sweetland (2000).While analysing the data gathered from the research, The SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was used to analyze the data gathered by the research instruments. In order to determine whether or not there has been any difference among the teachers? perceptions according to sex and subject area variables, the t-test was used. On the other hand, variance analysis (One-Way ANOVA) has been used to determine whether there was any difference among the teachers? perceptions according to school size and work experience variables or not. At the end of the test where there have been meaningful differences, to determine the sources of this difference Scheffe and Dunnet C test were applied. Furthermore, when significant differences were found between groups, the effect size of the differences was tested using eta-square (?²) correlation coefficient.As a result of descriptive statistics, it was determined that teachers participating in that research have perceived their organizational socialization levels as ?high? and found the bureaucratic structure of their schools mostly as enabling and rarely as coercive.As a result of analyses related to the independent variables, it was found that the organizational socialization levels of teachers have changed significantly according to the subject area variable, the organizational socialization levels of class teachers are higher and the variable of subject area had a small effect size on organizational socialization (?²=.03). According to the work experience variable, organizational socialization levels of teachers changed significantly, teachers who have more working experience had a higher level of organizational socialization and work experience variable had an intermediate effect size (?²=.10). According to the sex and school size variables, there haven?t been found any meaningful differences among the organizational socialization perceptions of teachers.According to the working experience variable, it has been found out that teachers? perceptions of the bureaucratic structure of their schools have changed significantly only in the dimension of enabling bureaucracy, and teachers who have 21 years or above of working experience have perceived their schools? bureaucratic structure more enabling than the ones who have 11-20 years of working experience. It has been found that working experience variable had a small size effect (?²=.04) on the dimension of enabling bureaucracy. According to the sex, subject area and school size variables, there hasn?t been found any meaningful difference among the perceptions of teachers in the dimensions of both enabling and coercive bureaucracy.As a result of correlation analysis performed to determine the relationship between the bureaucratic structure of schools and teachers? organizational socialization, a positive intermediate relation has been found between organizational socialization and enabling bureaucracy and a negative small relation has been found between the organizational socialization and coercive bureaucracy.