Analysis of Teachers' Perception on School Principals According to Leadership Models: Sample of Elazığ City/Öğretmenlerin Okul Müdürü Algılarının Liderlik Modellerine Göre İncelenmesi: Elazığ İli Örneği

The present school principals are expected to be the persons initiating the learning processes and supporting his subordinates’ skills and creativity in order to achieve the organizational aims rather than the persons who know everything beforehand and check whether his subordinates comply with his instructions. At this point, how teachers perceive the school principals’ management styles is crucial. With this research, it is aimed to determine the teachers’ perceptions on school principals along with the perceptions of school principal they would like to have according to the leadership model. In line with this purpose, it has been tried to define the leadership models in which the metaphors the teachers have put forward for the perception of school principal are included according to the variables of gender, education level and field of study. In this research designed in line with the qualitative research approach, “content analysis” method has been used. Within this context, the participants have been asked open-ended questions such as “School principal is like……..” “Because ………….” and “School principal should be ………..” “Because ……….”. In addition, the teachers have been asked to caricature the image of school principal they have in their mind and the one they would like to have. The study group determined with a stratified random sampling method consisted of 50 teachers. Stratified sampling method has been used in this research. Considering the results obtained from the research, the perception of the school principal available in teachers’ minds is an administrator type who applies the rules determined by the regulations and adopts traditional administrative mentality. Based on the teachers’ opinions analysed, the school principal that the teachers would like to see should have rather paternalistic attitude and humanistic leadership model dealing with the problems of his employees. The results obtained from the caricatures drawn by the teachers support these findings.