The relationship between school administrators' levels of social exchange, absorptive capacity and perception of psychological contract

The main aim of this research is to determine the relation among school administrators' levels of social exchange, absorptive capacity, and perception of psychological contract. Furthermore we have intended to determine if there is statistically meaningful differences among school administrators' views on social exchange, absorptive capacity and psychological contract according to demographic variables and if social exchange and absorptive capacity are predictors of school administrators' psychological contract perceptions. The population of this relational survey research consists of 341 school administrators, working in 147 schools in Bolu in 2018-2019 academic year. All schools have been reached in the universe and 249 usable surveys have been gathered for this research. The data in the research were collected from school administrators via a scale. Four survey instruments were used in the research. The first one was personal inquiry form that was created for a short explanatory information about survey instruments and a collecting knowledge with respect to participants to survey. The other survey instruments were Social Exchange Scale (Karagonlar, Öztürk ve Özmen, 2016), Absorptive Capacity Questionnaire, School Administrators' Psychological Contract Questionnaire that were developed by the researcher. Data was analyzed with SPSS 17 software. Analyzing the data, percentage, frequency, standart deviation, Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis H test, correlation and regression analysis were used. According to the results, school administrators' views on levels of social exchange, absorptive capacity, and dimension of acquisition are at 'agree' level. The school administrators' views on levels of dimensions of assimilation, transformation and exploitation are at 'strongly agree' level. Also school administrators' views on realitional contract, balanced contract and psychological contract are at 'agree' level. The dimension that has the lowest mean is transactional contract with 'neither agree nor disagree' degree. School administrators' views on social exchange, absorptive capacity, and psychological contract have been analyzed by demographics variables. According to the results, it is found that school administrators' gender, education level, seniority at current school and the number of students have significant effect on social exchange. School administrators' type of their school and position have significant effect on school administrators' levels of absorptive capacity. Also school administrators' position, age, seniority, seniority at current school and the number of sudents have significant effect on psychological contract. According to the results, it is found that social exchange, absorptive capacity, and psychological contract have positive, statistically significant and medium level relationship. Social exchange and absorptive capacity are predictors of school administrators' psychological contract. Key words: School administrators, scial exchange, asorptive capacity, pychological contract.