Analyzing the relationship between physical education teachers' leadership behaviors and their communication skills (Ankara case)

The purpose of the present study is to determine the relationship between physical education teachers' leadership behaviors and their communication skills.The universe of the study was comprised of the teachers working at State High Schools of Ministry of National Education (MONE) in Ankara during 2012-2013 academic year. According to the statistics by MONE, there were 1138 male and 513 female, 1651 in total, physical education teachers in Ankara during 2012-2013 academic year (ankara.meb.gov.tr). The sampling of the study consists of randomly selected 486 physical education teachers from schools in Çankaya, Yenimahalle, Keçiören, Altındağ, Sincan, Etimesgut and Mamak districts. "Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire-MLQ 5X – SHORT" developed by Bernard Bass and Bruce Avolio (1995) and Communication Skills Evaluation Scale developed by Korkut (1996) and Personal Information Form prepared by the researcher were used as data collection tools. Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal Wallis-H test and Frequency Analysis, Mean and Standard Deviation analyses were used in order to determine their leadership and communication skills and whether these skills change according to their personal features. The significance level was accepted as 0.05. According to the results of the analyses, physical education teachers use transformational leadership behaviors more than transactional leadership behaviors; when it comes to gender, statistics showed that female teachers had higher perceptions of transformational leadership in all dimensions. According to the findings, it is possible to say that when the level of physical education teachers' use of the leadership behaviors of idealized influence-attributed, idealized influence-behavior and inspirational motivation increases, the level of communication ability increases; when the level of physical education teachers' actualization of conditional reward, active-management by exception and passive management by exception leadership features increases, the level of communication ability increases, too. Key Words: Leader, Leadership, Communication, Physical Education, Physical Education Teacher.