Examination of the relationship between the public leadership behavior of school administrators and teacher's autonomy

The aim of this research is to reveal the relationship between school administrators' public leadership behaviors and teacher autonomy. The research is quantitative method and designed in a relational survey model. The correlational survey model was used in the research. The population of the research consists of 4176 teachers working in public schools in Siirt in the 2020-2021 academic year. 361 teachers selected from the population by simple random method consist the sample of the research. Research data were obtained using the Public Leadership Scale developed by Tummers and Knies (2015) and adapted into Turkish by Tösten, Çelik Şahin and Han (2018) and the Teacher Autonomy Scale developed by Çolak (2016). In the analysis of data; frequency, mean, standard deviation, ANOVA test, Kruskal-Wallis H test, Mann Whitney U test, and Spearman correlation test were used. It was determined that the public leadership behaviors of school administrators were at the level of agree. In addition, in the study, it was determined that teachers' perceptions of autonomy were high and the lowest average was in the sub-dimension of professional development autonomy. In the study, it was found that the autonomy levels of teachers differ in the grade of school they work in; however, it was determined that there was no significant difference with age, seniority and gender. It has been determined that there is a significant difference between the teaching process autonomy and professional communication autonomy, which are sub-dimensions of teachers' autonomy perceptions at primary and high school levels. According to this, it was determined that teachers working in primary school had higher perceptions of teacher autonomy compared to teachers working in high schools. As a result, in the research; A positive, moderately significant relationship was found between school administrators' public leadership behaviors and teacher autonomy, similarly a positive relationship was found between all sub-dimensions of school administrators' public leadership behaviors and all sub-dimensions of teacher autonomy.