School Leaders' Innovation Managements and Organizational Stress: A Relational Model Study

This century is a century in which vertiginous rapid change is experienced. In each day, new innovations are being part of our lives. For this reason, innovation term is a dynamic concept that emerges in every field and it is inside of life. "Innovation" is an English term but it is adopted in daily life in Turkish as "inovasyon" with the same meaning. The world is rapidly changing and developing, so the understanding of innovation term as a dynamic continuum should be guided and managed in a correct way. Schools are also affected from this situation both directly and indirectly. School leaders have some duties and responsibilities to gain the positive aspects of the influence and to avoid from negative aspects. While school leaders provide this interaction that is based upon innovation, they should preserve their schools' existing balance, and they should carry out innovations in a correct proportion, shape and time. Otherwise, they may harm their schools' organizations or functions. Another variable that may harm schools' organizations or functions is organizational stress. Organizational stress is termed as a situation that may supply divergence from normal functions of people. It may differ with respect to people and is caused by the relations between person and organization. In any organization, the increase in the organizational stress level may result with divergence of workers from normal functions. The cause of this is the psychological and physiological fatigue of workers. Under this circumstance, behaviors of the person may be affected both negatively and directly. The aim of this study is to investigate the level of relationship between school leaders' innovation management approaches and organizational stress. Descriptive relational screening model is used throughout the study. The population of the study consist of 940 elementary, 911 middle, and 649 high school teachers in Kocasinan province of Kayseri city. Stratified sampling procedure is used and nearly 1000 inventory is distributed to all school levels. 171 elementary, 178 middle and 164 high school teachers replied the data collection tool. Data are analyzed using R 3.2.4 and SPSS 21.00. In the light of the results, significant but small relationships in the negative direction are observed across organizational culture and structure factor of school leaders' innovation management behaviors and (i) clustering structure, (ii) role structure, and (iii) cultural structure factors of organizational stress. In addition, again small but significant relationship in the negative direction is observed across project management factor of school leaders' innovation management behaviors and cultural structure factor of organizational stress.