The effects of open leadership characteristics and adoption of social networks situations of administrators on organizational uncertainty: The case of Fırat University

Purpose of Study: The main purpose of this study is to determine the opinions of academic and administrative staff about the effects of open leadership characteristics and adoption of social networks situations of administrators on organizational uncertainty. Methods: The research was carried out according to a descriptive approach, following a relational design of the general survey model. The study group consisted of 650 randomly-selected and voluntarily-participating academic and administrative staff working at Firat University in the academic year of 2013-2014. As a data collection instrument an inventory of measuring form which developed by the researcher, the Open Leadership Scale (OLS), Adoption of Social Networks Scale (ASNS), Organizational Uncertainty Perception Scale (OUPS) were used to collect the data in the study. There was also an personal information sheet to collect demographic and social traits of participant. The data obtained from 650 inventory were added to the program of Statistical Package for the Social Science, LISREL and AMOS. The calculations such as descriptively statistics, independent samples t-test, one way ANOVA have been adapted to the data and the results have been interpreted. In addition to that, ANOVA analysis has been applied to see whether there is a meaningful variance between the groups. If there has been a meaningful variance then Bonferroni test has been applied to find out the variance between two groups. And then also the assessment of the data was made with correlation, regression and structural equation modeling analysis. Accordingly, the scales rates of total variance explained is respectively %67.6 for OLS (α=.95), %80.1 for ASNS (α=.96) and %57.2 for OUPS (α=.90). Findings and Results: The result of the study indicated that; there are meaningful positive relationships between variances of the study which are open leadership, adoption of social networks and organizational uncertainty. And findings of this research shows that adoption of social networks has a partial mediation effect between open leadership and organizational uncertainty. In the study, the impact of open leadership on organizational uncertainty is found as γ=.49; and, after the inclusion of the mediating variable to the model, this impact falls back to γ=.46. In addition to all these, the subdimensions of adoption of social networks have a partial mediation effect on the relationship between open leadership and organizational uncertainty. Accordingly, the partial mediation effect of social networks over the relationship between open leadership and organizational uncertainty affective well-being was detected by using structural equation modeling and Sobel test. Additionally, participants' professional seniority, gender, tasks, ages, educational levels, task types and academic titles were determined as effective factors on their opinions about open leadership, adoption of social networks and organizational uncertainty.