The examination of servant leadership behaviors demonstrated by school principals according to the perceptions of teachers

The purpose of this study is to determine the level of servant leadership behaviors demonstrated by school principals within the frame of of teachers' perceptions and see if it changes depending on the variables like gender, professional seniority, branch and educational status of the teachers. The servant leadership behaviors of the school principals were examined under the dimensions of " service, love, trust, altruism, humility, vision and empowerment" in this study. The population of the study includes teachers working in Tokat city center and its districts Sulusaray and Yeşilyurt in 2012-2013 educational year. The sample of the study is 677 teachers chosen with the method of stratified sampling. "Servant Leadership Assessment Instrument", developed by Dennis (2005) and applied to the teachers to evaluate the level of the servant leadership behaviors of the school principals, consists of 7 dimensions and 42 items scaling "never, rarely, usually, mostly and always". The instrument also has a section in the first part in which personal information can be found relating to the participants. SPSS 15 packet program was used in analyses of the data. Besides descriptive statistics (i.e. percentage, frequencies, means and standard deviation), inferential statistics (i.e. t-Test, one-way Anova and Kruskal Wallis H-Test) were also used to analyse the data. According to the research findings, variability is seen in all the dimensions looking to the level of the servant leadership behavior of the school principals with regard to principals' professional seniority. It is concluded that the level of performing servant leadership behaviors of principals having 11-15 years of seniority is more positive than those of 1-5 years and 16+ years under the dimensions of "service", "love", "trust", "altruism", "humility", "vision" and "empowerment". It is seen that the professional seniority and the school level of the teachers do not have a direct relationship with the exhibition of servant leadership behavior by the school principal. It is also inferred that the principals graduated from "Faculty of Education" display servant leadership behavior more positively compared to the principals graduated form "other faculty". Examining the perceptions of the teachers relating to the servant leadership behaviors demonstrated by the principals with regard to their graduation level, it is seen the bachelor's graduates have a higher one than the master's graduates. It is also concluded that the teachers working in socio-economically higher schools have a more positive perception in relation with the principal's servant leadership behavior display compared to those in lower schools. Key Words: Leadership, servant leader, school principal, teacher.