The Relationship Between School Principals’ Paternalistic Leadership and Teachers’ Job Burnout: An Action Research

The Relationship Between School Principals’ Paternalistic Leadership and Teachers’ Job Burnout: An Action Research

The aim of this study is to identify the extent of relationship between teachers’ evaluations concerning school principals’ paternalistic leadership level and teachers’ job burnout level and also to identify the underlying reasons and sources for this relationship. 192 school principals and 192 teachers, who work in state schools incorporating special education classes in two counties of a city of Turkey, have joined in quantitative dimension of this study carried through the action research paradigm and a research design like convergent parallel design. T-test, anova and inductive content analyses have been carried through collected data by favor of two likert scale for quantitative dimension and a semi-structured questions set for qualitative dimension. As a result of analyses, it is revealed that the more administrators’ paternalistic leadership level increases the less teachers’ job burnout level decreases reasonably and qualitative findings are explicit confirmations of quantitative findings. 

This study has been carried out by a research design like the mixed method consisting of quantitative and qualitative data collection along with analysis processes. The working group of this study is totally consisted of 217 participants of whom are 25 school principals’ s 

and 192 special education teachers, who work in state schools under the Ministry of National Education (MEB) incorporating special education classes in two counties of a city of Turkey. Whereas the research’s quantitative size constitutes all the special education teachers in the working group, its qualitative size constitutes 25 special education teachers and 25 school principals. Because of the fact that there are 12 counties in the city the research made and consequently the process of selecting just two counties in quantitative size has been made by simple random sampling method.