The analysis of relationship between the teachers' perceptions of distributed leadership and organizational commitment

The purpose of this study is to define the perceptions of state and private school teachers about distributed leadership and organizational commitment and further, examining the relations between two in terms of some variables. In the research, by the help of mix method it has been determined if the quantitative data supports the qualitative data. For the quantitative part of the study, correlational method based on descriptive method has been used. The target population of the study is composed of 1863 men and 1420 women; totaly 3283 state school teachers, and also 116 private school teachers who work at different schools that locate in the centre of Malatya. 728 teachers constitute the sample of the study. Also, purposefully selected 12 participants contributed to the collection of qualitative data out of this 728 teachers. The documents that provide data for the research are two scales and a semi-structured interview. ?Distributed Leadership Scale for School Organization? which has been improved by the researcher and ?Organizational Commitment Scale for Teachers? Üstüner (2009) are used for collecting quantitative data. ?Distributed Leadership Scale for School Organization? has five dimensions which are called as ?organizational development and cooperation, vision-mission, taking responsibility, school culture and organizational facilities.To analyze the gained data, t test and variance analysis (ANOVA-ONEWAY) have been used. The level of significance is accepted as .05 / .01.For the qualitative part of the study, the data is gathered from the teachers eight of whom from state and four of whom from private schools. The semi-structured interview form which contains 8 questions and 19 probes is used for gathering information. By the help of content analysis, qualitative data is analyzed tematically and the results compared with quantitative results.The research results indicated that, the perception of distributed leadership is higher in private schools in comparison with state schools. Likewise, the perception of organizational commitment is higher in private schools in comparison with state schools. Between the perception of distributed leadership and organizational commitment of the state and private school teachers, there is a positive, high and significant relationship. The perception of distributed leadership of men is higher in both state and private schools. The results have shown that qualitative data supports the results of quantitative data. Key words: Distributed leadership, leadership, organizational commitment