The relationship between favouritism behaviours of secondary school administrators and organizational commitment of the teachers

The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between the favouritism behaviours of secondary school administrators and organizational commitment of teachers. The research population consists of 3403 teachers from 64 secondary schools in the central district of Diyarbakir in the academic year of 2016-2017. The data collection instrument was applied to randomly selected 376 teachers from 22 schools. "Favoutism in the School Management Scale", developed by Erdem and Meric (2012) and three dimensional "Organizational Commitment Scala", developed by Meyer, Allen and Smith (1993) and adapted into Turkish by Dagli, Elcicek and Han (2017) were used in this research. "Favouritism in the School Management Scale" contains 4 dimensions (planning, organising, coordination and evaluation) and 25 items. "Organizational Commitment Scale" consists of 3 dimensions (affective commitment, normative commitment and continuance commitment) and 18 items. For the analysis of the data; mean scores, standard deviation, Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis test were used. The relationship between favouritism and organizational commitment behaviours were analysed by means of Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. The level of significance was 0.05. Some of the important findings were listed below: 1. Teachers participated the overall mean of "Favouritism in the School Management Scale" at "sometimes" level. According to perceptions of teachers, the first three items which have the highest means at favouritism scale are : "(1) In the preparation of teachers' weekly lesson plan ( =3,30;Sometimes)", "(2) In the planning of lesson dissemination( =3,12; Sometimes)", "(3)Taking into consideration the complaints of teachers ( =3,08; Sometimes)". 2. No significant difference was detected with respect to the teachers' educational background, gender, marital status, professional experience and union on the perceptions of favouritism behaviours. Nevertheless, significant difference was found in all dimensions and throughout the whole scale of favouritism regarding to school size (the number of teachers) variable. 3. Teachers participated the overall mean of "Organizational Commitment Scale" at "neutral" level. According to teachers' perceptions, the first three items which have the highest means are: "(1) Right now, staying with my organization is a matter of necessity as much as desire ( =3,69; Participate)", "(2) I do not believe that a person must always be loyal to his or her organization ( =3,44; Participate)", (3) One of the few serious consequences of leaving this organization would be the scarcity of available alternatives ( =3,26; Neutral)". 4. No significant difference was detected with respect to the teachers' educational background, gender, marital status, professional experience and union on the perceptions of organizational commitment behaviours. Nevertheless, significant difference was found in all dimensions and throughout the whole scale of organizational commitment regarding to school size (the number of teachers) variable. 5. In the study, a moderate level of negatively significant relationship was found between favouritism behaviours of school administrators and organizational commitment of teachers. (r = -.359, p < .01). The more favouritism behaviours of school administrators are, the less organizatioal commitment of teachers are.