Examining the relationship between teachers' communication skills and leadership characteristics

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between communication skills and leadership characteristics of teachers. The research group consists of 225 teachers in total, 38 of whom are Turkish teacher, 41 of whom are Physical Education and Sports Teacher, 35 of whom are Guidance Teacher, 48 of whom are preschool teacher and 63 of whom are Classroom teacher, working in schools affiliated to the District National Education Directorate in Patnos district of Ağrı province. The participants were administered a personal information form prepared by the researchers, the 'Communication Skills Assessment Scale' developed by Korkut (1996) and the 'Leadership Orientation Inventory' developed by Bolman and Deal and adapted into Turkish by Dereli (2002). SPSS 22.0 package program was used to analyze the data. The statistical significance level was taken as 0.05 in the study. For the assumption of normal distribution of the data, skewness and kurtosis values were examined and it was seen that the distribution was normal. Therefore, T-Test was used for comparisons of two independent groups, and one-way ANOVA test was used for more than two groups. Pearson Correlation analysis was used to determine the relationship between the scale sub-dimensions. Significant differences were found in communication skills according to the age and years of experience variables and in leadership orientation according to the teaching field variable. As a result, strong positive significant relationships were found between communication skills and leadership orientation sub-dimensions. It can be interpreted that leadership orientation will increase as communication skills increase.