Kişilik Özellikleri İle Liderlik Yönelimleri Arasındaki İlişki: Eğitim Fakültesi Öğrencileri Üzerine Bir Çalışma

The aim of this correlational study is to research the level of relation between teacher candidates’ personal traits and leadership orientation. Population of this study had included 1677 teacher candidates whom studies undergraduate program of Education Faculty at Eastern Mediterranean University. The sampling consist of 508 teacher candidates and those candidates was determined by using the method of random sampling. Two questionnaries; “Sıfatlara Dayalı Kişilik Testi” which was developed by Bacanlı, Aslan and İlhan (2009) and “Liderlik Yönelim Ölçeği” that developed by Bolman and Deal (1991) and was adapted to Turkish by Dereli (2003). Independend variables included; age, gender, nationality, type of high school graduated, education level of parents, income level of their parents, program of study, current class level and grade-point average. The data were analysed by IBM SPSS Statistics 22.0 programme, techniques such as “Pearson’s Product-Moment Coefficient”, “Kruskal Wallis”, “Mann Whitney-U” and “Step Wise Regression Analysis” were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that personality traits and leadership orientations of teacher candidates are open to experience with “quite appropriate” as average grade. It is also found that teacher candidates have potential to meet the needs of their future students both in the field of education and context value. Results also demonstrated that there is positive but low level of relationship between teacher candidates’ personality traits and leadership orientations. This result suggests that teacher candidates are not suitable for as profession in terms of both personality and leadership, or they are required to receive more intensive leadership training during their education. There are significant differences had been found between teacher candidates’ personality traits and leadership orientations according to the independent variables. In the light of the results of this study, it is suggested that not only centralized examinations but also personality traits and leadership orientation should be evaluated while determining teacher candidates. Keywords: Education Faculty, teacher candidates, personality traits, leadership orientation