School principals' role in creating, sustaining and changing a school culture (The example of Bahçelievler district, İstanbul)

Culture is all the meanings that shared by a society?s members. And culture is composed of an individual?s, a group?s or a society?s mental and spiritual qualities of psychological and social properties as thoughts, beliefs, sentiments, customs and habits. Organizational culture, on the other hand, is transferred hypotheses of experiences by the former members of the organization to the new comers. And the managers are primarily responsible and effective individuals creating an organizational culture. As a cultural leader, school principals are able to create a positive school culture in which students and teachers can work efficiently. A school principal, consciously or not, manages the school culture too, alongside the other managerial tasks. If a school principal is aware of the power of the school culture and its? value in the managerial processes, she/he then can manage the school more efficiently. The first task in managing the school culture has to be creating a powerful school culture for the principals.With this research, it is aimed to find out whether teachers? and principals? perceptions are different about the principals? cultural leadership role in the state elementary schools. In order to achieve this goal, a four dimensional questionnaire was used and then these two groups? data were compared according to their demographic variables.The data for the research have been collected from 70 school principals and 200 teachers working for the elementary state schools in Bahçelievler district, in Istanbul. After checking the obtained data, statistics have been applied according to their normality distributions. Independent groups t-test, Mann-Whitney U test, one-ways analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Kruskal-Wallis test applied to find out if there were significant differences between or among groups.The result of the study shows that, there is a significant difference of perception between the school principals and teachers for the roles of the principals creating a school culture. As a cultural leader in their schools, principals? perceptions for themselves are very positive while teachers are not so positive. Our findings lead us to conclude that, the school principals have to make some fundamental changes to alter teachers? perception for their cultural leaderships in the schools.Key Words: Organization, Organizational Culture, School Culture, Cultural Leader.