The effect of social justice leadership on student school motivation

Student school motivation plays an essential role in student success. One of the most important factors needed to ensure the student motivation and constant school attendance is the concept of justice adopted by the educational organization where they study. One of the most important stakeholders that will lay out the concept of justice in educational organizations is the school principal. Accordingly, it is thought that the social justice leadership displayed by the school principal affects student school motivation. This study aims to determine the role of school principals' perceived social justice leadership on student school motivation. In this respect, an answer to the question ' Is there a correlation between the social justice leadership of school principals and student motivation?' from the perspective of secondary school students was sought. The universe of this study, based on the variables in relation to each other, consists of 18486 students studying in secondary schools in Afyonkarahisar Province Central District. While determining the sample, 408 students were involved in the study by using the stratified sampling method. In order to detect the perceived social justice leadership of school principals, the Social Justice Leadership Scale, developed by Özdemir and Kütküt (2015) was applied and to determine the school motivation of the students the School Motivation Scale for Secondary School Students, developed by Kaynak, Özhan and Kan (2017) was conducted. For the statistical analysis of the obtained data, confirmatory factor analysis, one-criterion variance analysis (ANOVA), t-Test with independent samples, Pearson's product of moments and simple linear regression analysis were used beside the complementary statistics such as arithmetic mean and standard deviation, As a result of the analysis, it has been concluded that there is a strong correlation between the social justice leadership of school principals and student school motivation. In particular, the support and critical consciousness sub-dimensions of social justice leadership play an important role on student school motivation.