The Relationship between Teachers' Motivation and Organizational Commitment: The Mediating Role of Perceived Principal Management Style

In this study, it is aimed to examine the mediating role of school principals' management styles in the relationship between teachers' motivation and organizational commitment. In the study, teachers working at all levels of education in public schools in the city center of Isparta in the 2021/2022 academic year constitute the universe. Simple random sampling method was preferred in the selection of the study group and data were collected from 962 teachers who volunteered. At the end of the extreme values, normality and multiple normality controls in the data set, 933 teachers were determined as the study group of the research. The perceived principal management style scale developed by Üstüner (2016), the organizational commitment scale for teachers developed by Üstüner (2009) and the adult motivation scale developed by Tulunay Ateş and İhtiyaroğlu (2019) were used as data collection tools in the research. The model established regarding the mediating role of management style in the relationship between teachers' motivation and organizational commitment was tested with the structural equation model. The demographic information, reliability coefficients and correlation values between the variables of the research participants were analyzed by SPSS 22, and the structural equation modeling was analyzed by LISREL 8.80. According to the research findings, relations between teachers' motivation, organizational commitment and perceived principal management style were determined. In addition, according to another finding of the research, the perceived principal management style has a partial mediating role in the relationship between teachers' motivation and organizational commitment. According to these findings, it can be interpreted that the effect of school principals' management style should be taken into account in increasing teachers' motivation and organizational commitment