The Relationship between School Principals' Leadership Styles, School Culture and Organizational Change

The purpose of the study was to identify the relationship between the leadership styles of school principals, school culture and their organizational change management capacity according to the teachers' perceptions. In the study, a quantitative research design was employed during data collection and the analysis phases. The sample of the study comprises randomly selected 382 teachers working in North Cyprus, during the 2019-2020 school year. The leadership styles scale of school principals, the scale for school culture and the scale of the organisational change management were used as data collection tools. Pearson correlation, regression, and path analysis were used for analysing data in addition to descriptive statistics. It was found that school principals exhibit transformational leadership characteristics, the perception of school culture by the teachers is strong and the perception of the organisational change is a medium level. It was also found that there are significant relationships between leadership styles, school culture, and organisational change, along with transformational and transactional leadership styles of school principals, which significantly predicted school culture, and school culture, which significantly predicted all sub-dimensions of organisational change. School culture has a mediator effect on both leadership styles and all sub-dimensions of organisational change, except that transformational leadership has only fully mediation effect with evaluating stage of organizational change. This research reveals the presumptions that transformational leadership executed by the principals supports to a greater extent positive effect on the teachers rather than transactional leadership and to contribute positive school culture and strengthening of organisational change process of the educational institutions. The models suggested in the study show that school culture might be effective in reducing negative behaviours of the teachers regarding the organizational change. To cope with resistance, prevent or reduce opposite opinions and negative indications of each stage of organizational change, strengthening teachers with the help of school culture is required.