An examination of primary school principals' perceived leadership behaviors and teachers' organizational commi̇tment levels in terms of some variables (Gaziantep sample)

This research was designed to examine the primary school principals' leadership behaviors perceived by teachers, and teachers' organizational commitment levels in terms of some variables in elementary schools in Şahinbey, Gaziantep in the 2011-2012 academic year. The sample of this research consisted of 424 teachers working in 14 elementary schools in Şahinbey district of Gaziantep province. `Descriptive model` was used as a research method. In this study, " Organizational Commitment Scale in Educational Organizations " and " "Descriptions of Leadership Behavior Scale Method" were used to collect data. The Research data were analyzed using "means", "standard deviation", "t-test", "one-way analysis of variance", "Post hoc multiple comparisons test" and "Pearson product moment correlation coefficient". In order to determine the level of organizational commitment of teachers and school principals' leadership behaviors, the average and standard deviation of the scale factors were identified. As a result of the analysis, a significiant, linear and positive correlation was found between the level of organizational commitment of the teachers and understanding-oriented leadership behavior and structuring displayed by theirpricipals. With the data obtained, it was also tested whether there were any differences between the levels of commitment of the teachers and their perceptions regarding the leadership behaviours of their pricipals in terms of variables such as seniority, age, branch, graduated school, the working hours in the same school between the surveyed teachers' assessments. As a result of these tests, statistically significant differences were detected between the sub-groups formed according to age, sex, senirioty and role variables while no statistically significant differences were found between the sub-groups formed according to other demografic variables (p<.05). Key words: Organization, Commitment, Organizational Commitment, Leadership