Antecedents and consequences of teachers' professional zone of acceptance: A cross-cultural comparison

The focus of this comparative case study is to examine the antecedents and consequences of teachers' zone of acceptance regarding the authority of school principals within the framework of cultural dimensions of individualism, uncertainty avoidance and power distance. The research was conducted in Germany, the United States of America, Ghana and Turkey, located in four different continents and determined by the typical case sampling method. The research processes in the selected countries were carried out in two different schools, one secondary school and one high school, selected with the convenience sampling method for each country. The participants of the study, on the other hand, consist of a total of 64 teachers, including 16 teachers from each country, determined by the maximum variation sampling method. The data were obtained by the semi-structured interview form developed by the researcher and was resolved by the content analysis technique. The results of the research show that the types of authority and administration approaches used by school principals in all four different countries where the study was conducted significantly shape the zone of acceptance of teachers. It is recommended that future research should address concepts such as motivation, stress, satisfaction, and professional and organizational commitment, which were identified in the results of this study but whose relationship to the concept of the zone of acceptance was not previously investigated.