The views of school administrators on leadership styles and social entrepreneurship skills (Sample of Kocaeli province)

The aim of this study is to determine the school administrators' opinions on the leadership styles and social entrepreneurship skills of the school administrators working at primary and secondary schools in Kocaeli, to determine whether there is a significant difference between the school administrators' opinions on the leadership styles and social entrepreneurship skills according to the demographic characteristics of the school administrators, an to determine whether there is a significant relationship between the leadership styles of school administrators and their views on social entrepreneurship skills. This research was conducted in the relational screening model. The universe of this study consists of 599 school administrators working in public primary and secondary schools in the city center of Kocaeli in the 2016 - 2017 academic year. All of the school administrators were reached within the scope of the research but the research was completed with 323 participants. In order to collect quantitative data related to this study, Personal Information Form developed by the researcher, Leadership Styles Scale developed by Akan, Yıldırım and Yalçın (2014), and Social Entrepreneurship Scale developed by Konaklı and Göğüş (2013) were used. The data were analyzed by SPSS 20 package program. Frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, Kruskal Wallis, Mann Whitney U and Spearmen Correlation tests were used to analyze the data. Some of the findings of the research are as follows. When the views of the school administrators on the sub-dmiensions of leadership styles are taken into consideration, the views on the transformational leadership style are at the level of "agree", while the views on the laissez-faire and transactional leadership styles are at the level of "undecided". When the views of the school administrators on the total of leadership styles are considered, it is seen that the findings are as the same as the above results. The highest average size is transformational leadership style, while the lowest average dimension is the laissez-faire leadership style. When the views of school administrators on social entrepreneurship sub-dimensions are taken into consideration, the views are at the level of "totally agree" in the dimension of personal creativity, while they are at the level of "agree" in the dimensions of risk taking and self-confidence. When the views of the school administrators on the total of social entrepreneurship are considered, it is seen that the findings are as the same as the above results. The dimension with the highest average is the size of personal creativity and the dimension with the lowest average is the dimension of self-confidence. The opinions of the school administrators about the leadership styles and their social entrepreneurship skills were examined according to the demographic information. According to this, in the leadership styles and its sub-dimensions, there was no significant difference between the views of the school administrators according to their gender, age, marital status, educational status, and professional seniority variables. On the other hand, there was a significant difference in the views of school administrators regarding leadership styles in transactional leadership and laissez-faire leadership according to the seniority variable in management. There was no significant difference neither in the sub-dimensions nor in the total of the views of school administrators on social entrepreneurship skills according to age, education status, professional seniority variables. On the other hand, it was seen that, in social entrepreneurship skills, only self-confidence sub-dimension revealed a significant difference according to the marital status variable, and that there was a significant difference only in the risk taking sub-dimension in terms of gender variable. The views of school administrators on the other sub-dimensions of self-confidence and personal creativity sub-dimension, and the total social entrepreneurship skill level did not make any significant difference according to gender variable. For this reason, it can ben said that opinions were similar to each other. It was seen that the views of school administrators on social entrepreneurship skills had a significant difference only in risk taking sub-dimension, that, in social entrepreneurship skills, there was a significant difference only in the self-confidence sub-dimension according to the marital status variable, and that there was a significant difference in the views of school administrators regarding leadership styles in transactional and laissez-faire leadership styles according to seniority variable. It was seen that there was a significant positive relationship between the views of school administrators about leadership styles and social entrepreneurship. Keywords: Leader, Leadership Styles, Social Entrepreneurship, School Administrator