The relationship between the instructional leadership behaviors of secondary school principals and organizational commitment of teachers

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORS OF SECONDARY SCHOOL PRINCIPALS AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT OF TEACHERS ABSTRACT The purpose of this research is to investigate the secondary education school principals' instructional leadership behaviors and the teachers' perceptions of organizational commitment in terms of different variables; to examine the relationship between the instructional leadership behaviors of secondary school principals and the organizational commitment of teachers and to test whether the instructional leadership behaviors of principals predict the organizational commitment of teachers. The research is a descriptive study used survey model. The population is consisted of the public school teachers in 2014-2015 academic year in the province of Istanbul on the European side. The sample of the study, which was determined by simple random sampling, is composed of 441 secondary school teachers from 28 schools. The data of the study were collected with Şişman's (2012a) "School Principals' Instructional Leadership Behaviours Survey" and Balay's (2000b) "Organizational Commitment Scale". SPSS 22.0 software was used for analysis of data. Skewness and kurtosis, histograms and Q-Q graphs were used to test whether the data distributed normally. Resulting from the normal distribution conditions were met, parametric tests were utilized. In the data analysis, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, coefficient of variation from descriptive statistics and independent samples t-test, one-way ANOVA, Pearson moments correlation analysis from parametric tests were used. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to test whether the instructional leadership behaviors of principals predict the organizational commitment of teachers. According to the results of the research; school principals had performed instructional leadership behaviors the most frequently for determining and sharing school purposes but rarely for promoting and improving teachers. The teachers' organizational commitments were discovered for the dimension of "compliance" in a minor level but for the dimensions of "identification" and "internalization" in medium level. There are signifficant differences in the teachers' instructional leadership perceptions according to the seniority, branch, length of service, education degree, graduated school and type of school variables related to school principals. Also seniority, branch, graduated school and type of school variables made a signifficant difference in the teachers' organizational commitment perceptions. It is found that "creating a regular education environment and climate" dimension of instructional leadership behaviors significantly predicts the "identification" and "internalization" dimensions of instructional leadership. Keywords: Instructional Leadership; Organisational Commitment; School Principals; High Schools.