Primary school administrators? impression management

Underlying the human relations, impression management is the way of managing the effects of positive or negative behaviours exhibited consciously or unconsciously towards other people. In impression management which occurs in verbal or nonverbal way within a certain process, individuals try to impress other people by using specific impression management tactics such as ingratiation, self-promotion, supplication, exemplification or intimidation. In this way, people reach their aims by either creating an image being accepted by society or protecting their positive current image or minimizing the bad effects of their behaviours on other people they are in communication with. Hence, this study which focuses on the impression management being the basis of human relations aims to reveal administrators? impression management tactics expressed by them and perceived by teachers. In accordance with this purpose, it is tried to determine the levels of their using impression management tactics and whether administrators care about impressions or not and if there is a significant difference between their duty, working duration, institution location and levels of their educational background. Besides this, it is also tried to determine whether there is significant difference between teachers? perceptions of administrators? impression management tactics by gender, levels of educational background, institution location and working duration.The population of the research consists of 209 principals and vise-principals adn 1507 teachers working in 81 primary schools having secondary grades (6,7,8) in province city center and other districts and villages in Bingöl. As sampling method, stratified sampling was used. Considering the accessibility for administrator samples, 55, 39 and 22 administrators in province city center, districts and villages were reached accordingly. 166 teachers in province city center, 85 in districts and 63 teachers in villages were chosen as sample. ?Impression Management Tactics Scale? used in the research ?Impression Management of the Public and Private High School Teachers in Turkey? by Demir (2002) was used as the data collection tool. For teachers, the adapted form of the same scale was utilized. SPSS Windows 15.0 software was used to analyse the collected data. In the analysis of the data, The Independent Gorup T Test , Non-Parametric Mann Whitnety U, One Way Analysis Of Variance and Non-Parametric Kruskal Wallis H Test The significance level was set as p<0,05. In the case of a significant difference among group averages, the Scheffe Test and the LSD Test was used to determine the source of the difference. The level of significance was selected as P<0.05. As a result of the research, it was determined that very large majority of primary school administrators cared about the impressions and only two of 116 administrators were female. According to the administrators? views, that they used praise at most and blocking and intimidation at least for teachers was determined. However, according to the teachers? perceptions of the impression management tactics applied by administrators, it was determined that administrators used repudiation at most, and apology and blocking at least.Key Words: Impression Management, Impression Management Tactics, Primary Schools, Administrators, Teachers