A study on attitudes of university administrators towards employees in the context of autonomysupportive behaviors from the perspective of self determination theory: A study at the Akdeniz University

The objective of this research is to study within the framework of the Self Determination Theory the extent of autonomy-supportive behaviors of university administrators and the extent that the administrators meet the autonomy requirement of employees as one of their basic psychological needs. Under the framework of this general objective, how autonomy-supportive or controlling are the attitudes of university administrators towards the employees in the event of work place problems taking place in the working environment and whether the attitudes of university administrators towards employees varied depending on the fact that the employees are academic or administrative staff and on the demographic properties of administrators are studied. The study consists of three chapters. The first chapter describes the concepts of motivation, organization and administration and deals with motivation throughout the management processes. The views of management theories on motivation are studied and motivation theories are examined with respect to scope and process. The second chapter introduces self-determination theory which is an approach of basic psychological needs and motivation. The third chapter is on research and findings and it deals with the attitudes of university administrators towards employees in the context of autonomy-supportive behaviors from the perspective of self-determination theory. The findings are analyzed in this chapter. The study is a descriptive and quantitative study using screening method. The universe of the study consists of around 200 academicians who work as administrators at the faculties of the Akdeniz University as dean, deputy dean, head of department, and at the vocational higher schools as director and deputy director. Sampling was not used in the study and data collection means was sent to all of the target population whereas the study group consisted of 116 academic administrators from five different faculties and various vocational higher schools who responded. A questionnaire of two parts was used as the data collection tool. The first part included demographic information of participants like faculty, gender and experience. The second part used the Problems at Work (PAW) Scale developed by Deci, Connell and Ryan (1989), the theoreticians of self-determination theory, in order to measure the autonomy support provided by administrators. The validity and reliability works of the concerned scale were already done before by them. The developers of the scale used the cronbach alpha method to test the reliability of the scale and calculated the alpha values of the scale as 0.70 and 0.75 in two different applications. In our study, alpha value was found to be 0.93. The scores of the scale given by the participants were analyzed by SPSS. The sub-dimensions of the scale were subjected to Kolmogorov-Simirnov test in order to obtain healthy findings from the indifference tests. According to the results of this test, tests on some variables or dimensions were subjected to parametric (t-Test and Anova) tests and some to nonparametric (Mann Whitney U and Kruskall Wallis H) tests. Accordingly, university administrators demonstrate Medium Level of Autonomy-Supportive behaviors towards both academic and administrative staff and generally the autonomy support provided to academic personnel is higher than the one that was provided to administrative personnel. A significant difference was found between the genders of participants on their High Level Control Behaviors towards staff. Control scores of men are higher than women however there is no significant difference between gender and autonomy support. In addition, a significant difference was found among the faculties with respect to control behaviors of participants towards staff. Administrators of the Faculty of Science and Faculty of Medicine displayed control behavior while the administrators of the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences had more autonomy supportive behaviors than the administrators of other faculty and vocational high schools. Based on these findings, suggestions were made that trainings should be organized for the administrators of faculties and vocational high schools to provide their subordinates with autonomy support. In addition autonomy support should be provided by the top administration of Rectorate and Higher Education Council to the administrators of faculties and vocational high schools in order to encourage them to display autonomy supportive behavior towards their subordinates.