The relationship between ethical leadership levels of primary school managers and the organizational trust and mobbing that primary school teachers experience

The aim of this research is to determine the relationship between the level of ethical leadership behaviors of school managers and the level of organizational trust and mobbing in the primary schools.The research was based on the relational search model and the population was consisted of 2131 teachers working in official primary schools of Ministry of National Education in Kastamonu. The sample set of research was consisted of seven districts of Kastamonu that were chosen randomly. There are totally 1549 teachers in these districts. These teachers were chosen from the population with the method of unproportional sampling. ?The Ethical Leadership Scale? was used to determine the ethical leadership levels of primary school managers and the ?Organizational Trust Scale? was used to determine the level of trust that teachers experience and ?Negative Acts Questionnaire? was used to determine the prevalence of mobbing in primary schools.The findings of the research showed that the perceptions of the primary school teachers about subscales of ethical leadership such as communicational ethics, behavioral ethics, ethics in decision making and environmental ethics were neither positive, nor negative. It is seen that they showed a medium level of perception on the subscales of ethical leadership. Primary school teachers perceived trust to manager and communication environment subscales of organizational trust positively, however, they could be said to have medium level of perception on the openness to changes and sensitivity to workers subscales of organizational trust. Results also showed that teachers were sometimes subject to negative acts in the aspects of duty and social relations.Another result of the research was that ethical leadership behaviours of school managers and organizational trust were negatively correlated with mobbing and that an ethical and trustworthy school environment decreased the perceptions of mobbing of primary school teachers. In addition, ethical leadership was positively correlated with organizational trust. It was found that ethical leadership had both direct and indirect effect on mobbing. As long as primary school teachers have more positive perceptions on the ethical behaviors of school managers, organizational trust increases, however, mobbing decreases. Results also showed that organizational trust was a stronger predictor than ethical leadership on mobbing.As a result of this research, it is found out that the organization level of teachers increases when the ethical leadership behaviors of school managers increase and that mobbing decreases when organizational trust increases.Key Words: Ethical leadership, organizational trust, mobbing, school manager, teacher