Investigating primary school administrators and teachers' perceptions of organizational creativity: The case of Gaziantep-Nizip

The purpose of the current study is to determine perceptions of school administrators and teachers working in state primary schools in Nizip District ,Gaziantep in 2011-2012 academic year regarding organizational creativity within the individual, administrative and social dimensions, and also to investigate whether school administrators and teachers' perceptions of organizational creativity vary according to gender, age, position at the school (administrator/teacher), branch, years of experience in the school, seniority and education level. To this end, the participants' perceptions of the dimensions of organizational creativity were determined via "Organizational Creativity Scale". This research includes administrators and teachers working in 29 state primary schools in Nizip District, Gaziantep. (58 administrators, 1104 teachers). The sample of the research was chosen randomly, data were collected from 487 participants, of whom 435 are teachers and 52 are school administrators (21 principals, 31 vice-principals) working in 26 state primary schools. Data collected via "Organizational Creativity Scale" were analyzed using SPSS 20.0 statistical program. To find out whether school administrators and teachers' perceptions of organizational creativity vary according to personal characteristics, "mean", "standard deviation", "t-test", one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and "Tukey test" were performed. School administrators and teachers' perceptions in the "individual", "administrative" and "social" dimensions were revealed through means and standard deviations of factors constituting the dimensions. The results showed that school administrators and teachers experienced a"satisfactory level" of organizational creativity " at Individual dimension = 3.81" , "at Administrative dimension = 3.49" , "at Social dimension =3.49" . In the "individual" dimension, the staff's organizational creativity perceptions varied at a significant level according to gender, age, position at the school; in the administrative dimension, their perceptions varied according to gender, age, position at the school, seniority, education level; and in the social dimension, the perceptions varied according to gender, position at the school, years of experience at the school, seniority and education level (p<.05).