The relationshipbetween organizational democracy perceptions and cynicism levels of academics

Abstract In this study, it was aimed to analyze the relationship of organizational democracy and organizational cynicism of the academic staff. Research population consists of academicians who are working in different faculties of universities located in Ankara. 472 academic staff (242 female and 230 male) took part in the study. The participant academicians' organizational democracy and organizational cynicism perceptions were investigated in relation to their gender, age, marital status, current university, and current faculty, academic position title, tenure, length of service in the current university, and having any administrative responsibility. The data were collected by the tools "Organizational Democracy Scale" (Tutar, Tuzcuoğlu ve Altınöz, 2009) and "Organizational Cynicism Scale" (Brandes, Dhardwadkar, and Dean, 1999). The data were analyzed by conducting descriptive statistics as arithmetic mean and standard deviation as t-test, ANOVA, Scheffe test of post hoc tests, Welch's t-test, Kruskal Wallis H test,Tamhane's T2 test, nonparametric multiple comparison test and Pearson correlation. The construction validity of the data collection tool, Organizational Democracy Scale, was tested by exploratory factor analysis (EFA). To test the reliability of the scales, Cronbach alpha coefficients were calculated. The Cronbach alpha value of the Organizational Democracy Scale was calculated as .98 whenthe Cronbach alpha value of the Organizational Cynicism Scale was calculated as .93 for the cognitive sub-dimension, .96 for the affective sub-dimension and .82 for the behavioral sub-dimension. In this study, it was found that academicians have moderate levels of organizational democracy; perceive lowest levels of organizational cynicism in cognitive and affective sub-dimensions and moderate levels in behavioral sub-dimension. The study also showed that there is a high, negative and statistically significant relationship between academicians' perception of organizational democracy and organizational cynicism attitudes in cognitive and affective sub-dimensions; and also there is a moderate, negative and statistically significant relationship between academicians' perception of organizational democracy and organizational cynicism attitudes in behavioral sub-dimensions.