EERA: The Relationship between Teachers?

Readiness for Change and Perceived Organizational Trust Author(s):Merve Zayim (submitting/presenting), Yasar Kondakci Conference:ECER 2011, Urban Education Network:26. Educational Leadership Format:Paper

Session Information
26 SES 02 B Paper Session Time:2011-09-13 15:15-16:45 Room:JK 25/138,G, 20 Chair:Lars Frode Frederiksen

Contribution
The Relationship between Teachers? Readiness for Change and Perceived Organizational Trust

Different external forces such as increased demand for quantity public schooling (Ozmen & Sonmez, 2007), incorporating technology to teaching (Argon & Ozcelik, 2008) meeting the requirements of the EU (Erturk, 2008), have pushed Turkish Education System to undergo different types of change. Increasing the rate of schooling, increasing computer literacy by adopting computerized education, adopting constructivist approach in education, and transferring administrative processes into computerized environment (e-school) are some change projects recently initiated by Ministry of National Education (MONE), which illustrate the pervasive change interventions in educational organizations (Aksit, 2007; Argon & Ozcelik, 2008). It can be argued that the success of change largely depends on the effectiveness of managing change interventions. In the context of Turkish Education System, the teachers play a very critical role in successfully accomplishing change initiatives. Teachers act like a bridge between principal, students, and parents and become the most essential constituency in the change interventions. Therefore, the backbone of the successful change interventions is supportive and enacting teacher behaviors towards the proposed changes. In this sense, it is essential to understand teachers? attitudes towards change, and the internal context factors that nurture positive teacher attitudes in order to reach the desired outcomes of the change efforts. This is parallel to several organizational change scholars? call to focus more on the attitudes of organizational members for successful change interventions (e.g., Clegg & Walsh, 2004; Mohrman, Tenkasi, & Mohrman, 2003). As the change atmosphere is generally accompanied with the fear of unknown and insecurity, it is associated with the teachers? resisting behaviors (Zimmerman, 2006). The relevant literature indicated that readiness for change is the primary attitude that reduces the resistance and fosters the enacting behaviors of 1

EERA: The Relationship between Teachers? Readiness for Change and Perceived Organizational Trust the employees (Armenakis, Harris & Mossholder, 1993). Similarly, ambiguity and fear of unknown caused by initiated change efforts were asserted to be decreased by trusting atmosphere in the organization (Martin, 1998). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between readiness for change and perceived organizational trust in the school setting. In accordance with the previous attitude studies, readiness for change has been investigated as a three-dimensional construct as cognitive readiness for change, emotional readiness for change and intentional readiness for change (Bouckenooghe, Devos, & Van Den Broeck, 2009). In a similar vein, organizational trust has also been investigated under three dimensions as faculty trust in principal, faculty trust in colleagues and faculty trust in clients (Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 2003). The three-dimensional framework for both constructs was utilized as a theoretical framework for this study. Therefore, this study was conducted to address the following research question: Is there any relationship between teachers? intentional, emotional, and cognitive readiness for change and perceived organizational trust in colleagues, in principal and, in clients (students and parents)?

Method This study was designed as a correlational research which sought to investigate the relationship between teachers? readiness for change and perceived organizational trust. The target population of this study was all the teachers working at the primary and secondary level public schools in the four selected school districts in the province of Ankara. The teachers working at the selected 53 schools constituted the accessible population of this study. The sample of the study comprised of 603 teachers working at the schools selected through two-stage cluster sampling which involves the selection of four school districts in the first step and the selection of 53 primary and secondary level public schools randomly in the second step. For the data collection, newly developed Readiness for Change Scale (Kondakci, Zayim, & Caliskan, in press) and Omnibus T-Scale (Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 2003) were utilized. The data were analyzed via canonical correlation statistical analysis. Some potential limitations of the study were subject characteristics bias caused by the self-report technique, external validity problems because of cluster sampling, and lack of causality between variables due to the nature of correlational design.

Expected Outcomes In order to investigate the relationship between readiness for change variables (intentional , emotional and cognitive readiness) and perceived organizational trust variables (faculty trust in principal, in colleagues and in clients) canonical correlation statistical analysis was conducted. The results of the canonical correlation analysis demonstrated that canonical coefficient for the relationship between perceived organizational trust and readiness for change is .43. As the criterion canonical correlation coefficient was taken into consideration (.30) (Hair, Black, Babin, & Anderson, 2010), the results indicated that the first canonical variate accounted for the significant relationships between the two sets of variables. The first canonical variate showed that readiness for change variables were significantly correlated with the perceived faculty trust variables (?2 (9) = 124.76, p=.00). To conclude, the results of the study revealed that teachers? readiness for change and perceived organizational trust were correlated with each other in a way that intentional, emotional, and cognitive readiness for change were all associated with teachers? readiness for change and contributed significantly in perceived organizational trust. Conversely, the results indicated that perceived organizational trust in colleagues, in principal, and in clients were all correlated with perceived organizational trust, and 2

EERA: The Relationship between Teachers? Readiness for Change and Perceived Organizational Trust contributed significantly in teachers? readiness for change.

References Ak?it, N. (2007). Educational reform in Turkey. International Journal of Educational Development, 27, 129-137. Argon, T., & zelik, N. (2008). ?lk?retim okulu yneticilerinin de?i?imi ynetme yeterlilikleri. Mehmet Akif Ersoy niversitesi E?itim Fakltesi Dergisi, December(16), 70-89. Armenakis, A. A., Harris, S. G., & Mossholder, K. W. (1993). Creating readiness for organizational change. Human Relations, 46(6), 681-703. Bouckenooghe, D., Devos, G., & Van Den Broeck, H. (2009). Organizational change questionnaire-Climate of change, process, and readiness: Development of a new instrument. The Journal of Psychology, 143(6), 559-599. Clegg, C., & Walsh, S. (2004). Change management: Time for a change! European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 13(2), 217-239. Ertrk, A. (2008). A trust-based approach to promote employees? openness to organizational change in Turkey. International Journal of Manpower, 29(5), 462-483. Hair, Jr. J.F., Black, W.C., Babin, B.J., & Anderson, R.E. (2010). Multivariate data analysis (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. Hoy, W. K., & Tschannen-Moran, M. (2003). The conceptualization and measurement of faculty trust in schools: The Omnibus T-Scale. In W. K. Hoy & C. G. Miskel (Eds.), Studies in leading and organizing schools (pp. 181-208). Greenwich, CT: Information Age. Kondakci, Y., Zayim, M., & Caliskan, O. (in press). Okul yneticilerinin de?i?ime haz?r olma tutumlar?n?n okulun ?retim dzeyi, yneticilerin deneyimi ve okul bykl? ba?lam?ndan incelenmesi. ?nn niversitesi E?itim Fakltesi Dergisi. Martin, M. M. (1998). Trust leadership. Journal of Leadership Studies, 8(1), 68-76. Mohrman, S. A., Tenkasi, R. V., & Mohrman Jr., A. M. (2003). The role of networks in fundamental organizational change: A grounded analysis. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 39(3), 301-323. zmen, F., & Snmez, Y. (2007). De?i?im srecinde e?itim rgtlerinde de?i?im ajanlar?n?n rolleri. F?rat niversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 17(2), 177-198. Zimmerman, J. (2006). Why some teachers resist change and what principals can do about it. NASSP Bulletin, 90(3), 238-240.

This proposal is part of a master or doctoral thesis.

Author Information
Merve Zayim (submitting/presenting) Middle East Technical University Educational Administration and Planning Ankara Yasar Kondakci Middle East Technical University, Turkey