The Effects of Leadership Styles on Organizational Health.

This article examines the effects of the leadership style of the principal, "transformational leadership and transactional leadership", along with teachers' job satisfaction on schools' organizational health. Specifically speaking, it investigates to what extent the variations in school health can be related to the principal's leadership style and teachers' job satisfaction. To this end, a Likert-type questionnaire was administered to 635 teachers working in Turkish schools out of a 875-person sample. Path Analysis was used to explain the direct and indirect relationships between the dependent and independent variables. As a result of the analysis, the most striking finding is that transformational leadership has a profound impact on teachers' job satisfaction, while the transformational leadership of the principal directly and, through teachers' job satisfaction, indirectly affects the school health. After the establishment of the Turkish Republic on 29 October 1923, the Unification of Education (Act 430) was enacted on 3 March 1924. Following approval of this act all educational institutes were affiliated to the Ministry of Education for the administration of educational activities from a single center. As a result of this restructuring the Turkish Educational system assumed its current structure. hi 1997, the five year primary education, the first step of the general education system, was merged with the three year secondary education, increasing the period of compulsory education to eight years. Within this process these schools, now named primary schools, largely solved their problems and established a more stable structure. However, high schools, which constitute the second phase of general education, had and are still having some problems. The General National-Education Act 1739 of 1973 describes High schools as three year educational institutes which give general, vocational and technical education. The high schools were redesigned as General high schools, Anatolian high schools, Vocational high schools, and Science high schools. Starting from the 2005- 2006 academic year high school education has been increased to four years. In 2004 -2005 there were 1,733,041 male and 1,306,408 female students (totaling of 3,039,449) in 6861 high schools throughout the country. The total number of teachers working in these schools was 167,949, being 86 thousand male and 81 thousand female teachers (National Educational Statistics, 2005). The objectives of high schools are stated by law. One of these objectives is preparing students for higher education. The gruesome fact that out of the 1,500,000 candidates who entered the University entrance exam in 2005 nearly 60 thousand obtained zero points has forced researchers and the authorities in the Ministry of Education to focus on these schools. A comparison of the success rates of the students from general high schools and those from other types of high schools formed an interesting domain of research. Undoubtedly a failure in converting the central system into a student centered system has played a significant role in this picture. In the present educational system the only authority involved in opening new schools, assigning new teachers and other academic personnel, preparation of the related curricula and meeting the financial needs of the schools is the Ministry of Education. , the recent act Local Management Act, which aims to localize the educational system, has not been put into action yet. In spite these difficulties, the renovation studies of the educational system have accelerated in recent years. Among these the most important, starting from the 1998-1999 academic year, were are allowing high schools to define their own visions, initiating performance evaluation studies of the teachers, and, most importantly, seeking new approaches to the training of school administrators in the light of contemporary data. In addition of these, studies related to the job satisfaction of teachers have been the focus of many researchers; this study belongs to this area in attempting to determine the job satisfaction levels of teachers. …