George Iordanidis
University of Western Macedonia
Iordanidis Georgios is an Associate Professor in Management and Administration in Education in the Department of Primary Education of the University of Western Macedonia in Greece. His main teaching and researching interests concern Management and Administration in education, Educational Staff Appraisal, School Management and Administration, School Leadership etc. Two books and many articles and papers have been published in many journals, while he has participated in many conferences in Greece and abroad. He is currently a Head of a post-graduate programm in Management and Administration in Education-Educational Leadership.
It is widely recognized that in a constantly changing environment, working relationships among teachers will be modified. The purpose of the present research is to examine the degree to which employment status, gender, age,... [ view full abstract ]
It is widely recognized that in a constantly changing environment, working relationships among teachers will be modified. The purpose of the present research is to examine the degree to which employment status, gender, age, specialization, total time of teacher service as well as the total time of service spent in a specific school unit are responsible for reinforcing or weakening respectively the intensity of teacher organizational commitment and teamwork in relation to leadership parameter.
The research is quantitative and studies the phenomenon of primary school teachers’ organizational commitment to teamwork, placing emphasis on the relationship between cause (variables of gender, age, specialization, years of total service, years of service in a particular school unit, as well as the employment relationship to the organization) and effect (commitment to teamwork).
The sample comes from public and private primary schools of the Regions of Attica, Western Greece, Western Macedonia, Epirus, Thessaly and Crete. A total of 9,500 questionnaires were sent and 1,093 were returned, yielding a percentage of participation of 11.5%.
The parameter of leadership seems to be affected by all the aforementioned variables. The following statements are included in the leadership group: “School teachers are willing to participate in school activities. School teachers show high levels of job satisfaction. School teachers give priority to school goals.” The teachers’ mean level of agreement concerning the aforementioned statements is 4.3251, with a standard deviation of 0.95358. The prevailing value utilized by the teachers in order to express their opinion was 5, which demonstrates an almost total agreement and acceptance of the aforementioned statements. The highest value observed in the leadership category is 6 and the lowest value is 1 in our scale. It is quite obvious that there have been certain teachers who totally agreed with these statements, whereas some others completely disagreed. The difference between the highest value of agreement in relationship to the lowest one is 5. Finally, the median of our sample is 5, which means that half of the teachers chose 5 as point of agreement regarding the statements-positions that had to do with leadership, whereas the other half expressed their disagreement choosing scores below 5.
