The investigation of the relationship between ethical leadership behaviors of school administrators and social capital levels of teachers

The aim of this study is from the point of the view of the teachers, to investigate the ethical leadership behaviors of school administrators and the social capital levels of teachers and to determine the reasons and solution suggestions related to the identified issues. The "explanatory sequential mixed method", in which quantitative and qualitative research methods are used together, has been utilized as the research design. In the qualitative part of the study, phenomenology was used to investigate some of the findings that emerged as a result of the quantitative part. The target population of the quantitative research consisted of 6371 teachers working at the 114 official high schools in five central districts of Adana during 2015-2016 academic year. Research sample of this study consisted 1196 teachers from 59 schools selected by simple random sampling method. The quantitative data of the study were collected by "Ethical Leadership Scale (ELÖ)" developed by Yılmaz (2005) and by "Social Capital Scale (SSÖ)" developed by Ekinci (2008). The qualitative part of the research's study group consisted of 38 teachers selected with purposeful sampling method from 5 schools. The semi-structured interview form prepared by the researcher was used to collect the qualitative data. In order to test if ethical leadership and social capital variables differ in the context of demographic variables, one-way variance analysis, ANOVA or independent sample t-test were performed to determine whether there was a significant difference between teachers ' perception average scores according to the categories of independent variables. Levene statistics were applied to find out if the groups provide homogeneity assumptions or not. In cases where the homogeneity assumption was not provided, the value of Welch F was used instead of ANOVA F. Correlation and regression analyzes were used for the relationship between these variables. According to the quantitative research results, the ethical leadership behaviors of the school administrators and the social capital levels of the teachers were found to be at the level of 3.40-4.19 "I agree". As a result of quantitative research, communicative ethical behaviors of managers differed significantly in favor of male teachers in the context of "gender" and "age". It was observed that there is a statistically significant relationship between ethical leadership behavior levels of teachers and social capital levels of teachers. It was also found out that ethical leadership behaviors of managers significantly predicted teachers' social capital levels. As a result, it can be said that ethical leadership accounts for 47% of the variability in the level of social capital; likewise, social capital accounts for 47% of the variability in the level of ethical leadership. Qualitative research data were analyzed by content analysis method and "NVivo 12 Plus" program was also used in content analysis of the research. It was determined that the majority of school administrators are male, that they communicate more easily with their peers, and that female teachers are more emotional as the reasons for the difference between male teachers and managers ' views on communicative ethical behavior compared to those of female teachers. Another quantitative result is that teachers in the age group of 51 and older "showed a higher level of ethical leadership behavior by school administrators" than those in the other age group. As the reasons for this differentiation, it was understood that teachers in the age group of 51 and above has more life and professional experience, they approach the events in a reasonable and positive way, they could ignore minor problems and their expectations are less. In addition, teachers ' levels of social capital differed significantly in favor of male teachers in organizational commitment, which is the lower dimension of social capital. Among the reasons for this situation are the fact that male teachers can adapt to school more easily than women, female teachers have more social roles outside the school, male teachers care more about their jobs and the majority of the managers are men. It was found that male teachers had higher levels of social capital than female teachers in the trust sub-dimension of social capital. This high rate was due to the fact that male teachers focus on the result, not detail, than women teachers, they approach the events more positively and objectively, and they have a better relationship with their fellow administrators. Suggestions were made to the practitioners and researchers in the light of the research findings. Key Words: Administrator, school, leader, leadership, ethics, ethical leadership, social capital