Relation between principals' authentic leadersehip behaviours and schools' academic optimism and teachers' organizational cynicism level

This study examined the relation among authentic leadership style of primary and elementary school principals, schools' academic optimism and teachers' organizational cynisim. Additionaly, it sought if academic optimism worked as a mediator between authentic leadership behaviours and organizational cynisim. The study was a relational screening model research. The target population for this study was teachers working in primary and secondary schools located in center of city and districts in Siirt. Three scales as measuring tool were delivered to 1943 teachers working in 111 school, 53 primary and 48 secondary schools, and 1099 quesstionnaire were convienent to be evalauted. Teachers completed "Authentic Leadership Questionnaire", "Schools' Academic Optimism Questionnaire" and "Orgainizational Cynisim Questionnaire". Various analysis techniques were used to analyze findings od study. AMOS 16.0 and SPSS 15 software were used in analyzing of collected data. Furtthermore, factor analyze and a path analysis was used in order to explore relationship between variables. Relations amoung variables was measured with path analysis and hypothesis of study were tested with 0,05 significant level. Findings from this stdy showed that teachers are moderately satisfied with authentic behaviours of principals. Meanwhile, perception of teachers to organizational cynism was meausred as moderate level and perception of teachers' school academic optimism was meaured as moderate. Furthermore, the most singificant contribution of this dissertation is that authentic leadership behaviours has pozitive corelation with academic optimism and negative corelation with organizational cynism. In other words, as data obtained from study was analyzed, correlational analysis reveals a positive and average relation between authentic leadership behaviours and acedemic optimism and a negative but average corelation was meausred between schools' academic optimisim and organizational cynicism. Furthermore, the results reveals that there is a negative and high corelation between authentic leadership behaviours and organizational cynicism. This means that the more school leaders perform authentic behaviours the more academic optimism of school school will increase. On the other hand, the rusults of the study present that the more school principals are authentic the less cynic behaviours the followers enact. Furthermore, findings from this study suggests that teachers' perception of their school's academic optimism had statistically relationshipto teachers' organizational cynicim, in other words, the more schools schools' level of academic optimism increase, the less teachers feel cynic. Analysis of data show that authentic leadership behaviours are stronger predictor rather than schools academic optimism on organizational cynicism. Consequently, as to the analyses results, principals's authentic leadership style, school academic optimism and organizational cynisim were correlated with each other. Key Words: Authentic Leadership, Self-awareness, Academic Optimisim, Organizational Cynisim, School Principal, Teacher.