Investigating the Relationship Between Personality Traits of Administrators and Teachers' Empowerment (Case Study: Public Schools of JAVADABAD)

Hadi Rezghi Shirsavar^*, Jafar Mansorikhah

Department of Educational Management, College of Education and Psychology, Garmsar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Garmsar, Iran

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between personality traits of administrators (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience) and teachers' empowerment. To achieve this objective, a descriptive research in correlational type has been used. The statistical population of this research includes all teachers and administrators in public schools of JAVADABAD. In this study, a five factor model of personality and a 49-item questionnaire to measure empowerment of teachers have been used to assess personality traits of administrators and the teachers' empowerment, respectively. The research hypotheses test has been done using SPSS and LISREL software. The results show that in general there is no significant relationship between personality traits of administrators and teachers' empowerment, and among the 5 dimensions of personality, there is only significant relationship between the characteristic of administrators' agreeableness and teachers' empowerment. The results suggested a way to improve knowledge and skills of teachers a top priority administrator consider. In addition, the performance of teachers affected by the performance of the executive directors, so it is necessary to improve their yield towering notice.

Keywords

Personality Traits, Five Factor Model of Personality, Teacher Empowerment

Received:May 17, 2015
Accepted: May 23, 2015
Published online: June 23, 2015

@ 2015 The Authors. Published by American Institute of Science. This Open Access article is under the CC BY-NC license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

1. Introduction

In the last half century, management and leadership practices in educational systems have undergone significant changes. Design new and different ideas and thoughts by authorities in the fields of management and education on the one hand, and the need to improve the quality of practices and results of education on the other hand, has revealed the necessity and importance of development and changes in technology and educational management for educational systems operators. Today, in almost all systems of education, there a positive attitude can be observed towards training, retraining of teachers, promoting and using effective teaching methods [1]. At the meantime, the strategy of teachers' empowerment is considered as one of the main strategies of education systems and strong theoretical topics could be found on this issue in the theoretical literature of empowerment as well. But despite this increasing attention to empowerment as the important strategy of organization, less empirical research has been conducted to examine what environmental or content factors, or what cognitive or organizational processes can facilitate it. Of the organizational factors in which researchers and executives are interested is investigating the role and behavior of administrators. As you know, one of the most important factors that form each person's behaviors and attitudes is its personality traits and it seems administrators, with different personality traits to have different attitudes to their subordinate employees' empowerment and on the basis of the same personality traits and attitudes they lead individuals to the empowerment.

Therefore, this research aims to investigate the impact of personality traits of administrators on teachers' empowerment. With this study, personal traits of administrators who are capable of empowering teachers are identified and strengthening the characteristics, the empowerment would be achieved in other administrators. Since this study sought to examine the relationship between personality traits of administrators and teachers' empowerment, first we will have a brief review of the concept of empowerment. The following summarizes the concept of personality and then the results of internal and foreign investigations relevant to the research subject will be summarized.

2. Theoretical Basics of Research

2.1. Empowerment

The term of EMPOWERMENT in Oxford Dictionary is defined as getting powerful, licensing, providing document and being capable. Zimmerman (1995) argues empowerment a word for which providing a definition is not easy and impossible, any one grows an idea about it in mind, but few people truly understand it. The history of first definition of empowerment term goes back to 1788, in which empowerment was known as delegation of authority the in organizational role of an individual. The authority should be delegated to the individual or to be seen in its organizational role [2]. Robbins et al (2002) argue that in defining empowerment some factors have been applied, such as internal motivation, understanding and commitment, job structure, the transfer of power or authority and sharing resources and information. In fact, empowerment is a continuous and permanent process which is analyzed in a dynamic environment at different levels [7]. According to Carter (2001) empowerment of employees is the set of systems, methods and procedures that through developing the capability and competence of individuals to improve and increase productivity, development and growth of organization as well as human resources are applied with respect to the objectives of the organization.

It can be said Thomas and Velthouse (1990) have offered a full definition of empowerment and they have added the term of psychological to it. According to them, the psychological empowerment is as a set of cognitive motivational domains which in addition to self-efficacy includes three other cognitive domains. The three domains are: a sense of autonomy (choice), a sense of being meaningful and effective [8]. Empowerment increases employees' sense of work ownership so that he takes pride in his job and willingly takes on duties, otherwise he will have a vacant stare of the feeling of empowerment. Employees who are more empowered have more commitment and less job stress; they are more likely to have more business cooperation. In other words, empowerment is a strategy of organizational development and growth. After years of experience, the world has come to the conclusion that if an organization wants to be a leader in the economy and of its work and not fall behind in the competition, it must have skilled, creative and high motivated manpower.

2.2. Personality

A definition which is often used for personality was introduced about seventy years ago by Gordon Allport. He said "personality is dynamic adjustments of Psychophysical systems inside the person that determine his unique agreeableness with environment". In other words, personality is the set of attributes and behaviors that describe the person. Personality is formed during the time by interaction of genetics and environmental factors. Genes largely form physical characteristics of individual. Some believe that genes have other major personality traits in common, such as intelligence, and the nature and the state of person [3].

Many studies have been conducted to identify personality traits and many theories have been expressed in this regard. One of the theories that are widely used and confirmed by many studies is the five factor model of personality that is also known as big five model. According to the theory, the five major dimensions are the infrastructure of other dimensions from which the most significant changes of personality arise. The five factors are:

Extraversion: refers to how easily a person can establish a relationship. Extroverts are often gregarious, well-spoken, and social. Introverts tend to be self-controlled, shy and quiet.

Agreeableness: refers to the individual inner desire to give up in the face of others. They are very agreeable, contributor and reliable. People who gain low scores in this case, have aggressive and incompatible spirit.

Conscientiousness: is a benchmark for reliability. A person that is very conscientious, responsible, organized, reliable and sustainable. People who get low scores in this factor are simply distracted, lose their integrity and are unreliable.

Emotional stability: refers to an individual's ability to resist stress. People with a positive emotional stability are usually calm, self-confident and reliable. Those who get high negative scores are often nervous, worried, anxious, depressed and uncertain.

Openness: refers to the interest and fascination of individual against novelty. Highly open people to experience, are creative, curious and have artistic sensitivity. Those who are on the other side follow local customs and traditions and they feel better among intimate things [4].

2.3. Literature Review

In today's world many research and studies have been conducted on empowerment and many models have been proposed of empowerment, among the research we can refer to the studies conducted by Canger & Kanungo, Thomas & Velthouse, Spreitzer, Armstid & Roland, Kirkman and Rosen, Steiner, Solin, Robbins et al., Nielsen and Pedersen and etc., but little empirical research has been done for investigating the direct impact of the role of administrators on employees' empowerment. Also reading theoretical background of the research we noted that no research has been done separately on the effect of the personality traits of administrators on empowerment; but a number of researchers have studied the effect of variables such as administrators' intelligence, administrators' leadership style, management strategies and etc. on employees' empowerment, that the most important of these studies are listed below:

Spreitzer in a study conducted in 1995, knows psychological empowerment associated with management innovative and effective behaviors and considers it essential for organizational success in complex and dynamic environments [9].

A number of authors in their studies have also had special attention to the important role of administrators' leadership and its impact on the empowerment of employees. Of the studies we can note the research by "Parker & Price" in 1994 and "Keller & Dansro" in 1995. The researchers concluded in their research that supportive administrators train empowered employees.

Bakhtiari and Ahmadi Moghaddam (2010) in a research studied the role of management strategies in administrators' empowerment. The results showed that among the management strategies, the factor of resources provision and the factor of structure have had the most impact and the least impact on the empowerment of administrators, respectively.

Razavi, H., (2006) in a study investigated the impact of the variable of intelligence (emotional, mathematical, and cultural) of administrators on employees' empowerment. The results of this study that was conducted at the National Iranian Oil Company showed a significant relationship between administrators' intelligence and employees' empowerment [6].

Track these topics suggest that administrators should learn how to develop the empowerment. But despite the emphasis on different forms of employees' involvement and empowerment, the power of employees' empowerment are not common in the set of most administrators' skills yet and empowerment could be seen very rarely than what's recommended.

3. The Research Hypotheses

3.1. The Main Hypothesis

There is a significant relationship between personality traits of administrators and teachers' empowerment.

3.2. The Sub-Hypotheses

There is a significant relationship between administrators' extraversion and teachers' empowerment.

There is a significant relationship between administrators' agreeableness and teachers' empowerment.

There is a significant relationship between administrators' conscientiousness and teachers' empowerment.

There is a significant relationship between administrators' emotional stability and teachers' empowerment.

There is a significant relationship between administrators' openness and teachers' empowerment.

4. Research Method

The present study is applied in terms of objective and it is a descriptive and correlational type research in terms of data collection. In this study, to assess the personality traits of administrators the five factor model of personality was used that was designed in the form of 44 questions based on a 5-point Likert scale.

The first part of the questionnaire questions has been incorporated to determine respondents' individual characteristic and in the second part of the questionnaire, questions have been provided to measure personality traits of administrators. To determine the empowerment of teachers a questionnaire including 49 questions with a 5-point Likert scale has been used as well to evaluate teachers' empowerment in the five dimensions of personal characteristics, administrator's support, school culture, the nature of job and the structure of school .The first part of the questions in teachers' empowerment questionnaire also includes demographic characteristic of teachers and in the second part each of the dimensions of teachers' empowerment have been designed in the form of multiple items. To determine the content validity of both questionnaires, the ideas of experts who are aware of the subject have been used and the factor reliability of questionnaires was also measured using confirmatory factor analysis and the factor reliability of questionnaires was confirmed as well. Cronbach's alpha coefficient has been used to determine the reliability; this coefficient is more than 0.8 for the questions of both personality and empowerment questionnaires, indicating both questionnaires have the acceptable reliability. In this study there are two types of statistical population: all administrators and teachers in public schools of JAVADABAD. The number of schools' administrators of JAVADABAD is 50 persons that considering the limited number of people there is no need to sampling and the questionnaire of administrators' personality were distributed among the 50 administrators from which 44 questionnaires were returned. Per administrator, four questionnaires of empowerment were randomly distributed among teachers of the same administrator, that totally 176 questionnaires of teacher' empowerment were used in this study.

After data collection, data analysis took place using the software SPSS19 and Excel 2013 and descriptive statistics methods were necessarily used for the analysis of demographic data, and inferential statistics (Spearman correlation coefficient to determine the correlation between the variables, the population mean test to investigate the factors status related to teachers' empowerment in the statistical sample and binomial test to determine the factors status related to personality traits of administrators) as well as structural equation modeling were used to examine the causal-effect relationships of variables [6].

5. Data Analysis

As mentioned in the study's hypotheses, the model presented in this study is as the following (Figure 1)

Fig. 1. The model of research hypotheses.

Before testing the research hypotheses on the presence or absence of a relationship between the variables of personality traits of administrators and teachers' empowerment, first the status of empowerment index in the statistical sample of teachers as well as the secondary variables of personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience) in the statistical sample of administrators must be examined.

5.1. Check the Status of Teachers' Empowerment

The status of teachers' empowerment index in public schools of JAVADABAD was studied using the mean test of statistical population at 95% confidence level. Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics. As it can be seen the mean of empowerment index in the sample is greater than 3, but it has to be approved through the inferential statistics (hypothesis test or confidence interval).

Table 1. Descriptive statistics of empowerment variable.

The results of T test to check the status of teachers' empowerment index in public schools of JAVADABAD are shown in Table 2.

Table 2. The results of one-sample T test for empowerment index.

Table 2 shows that the test sig is smaller than the significance level of 0.05%, thus it can be said empowerment index of teachers in public schools of JAVADABAD has a relative desirable status.

5.2. Check the Status of the Personality Traits of Managers

Table 3 shows the descriptive statistics. As it can be seen the mean of every five factors of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience in the statistical sample of administrators is greater than 3, but this should be approved through the inferential statistics (hypothesis test or confidence interval).

Table 3. Descriptive statistics of five factors of personality.

The results of the binomial test to check the status of five factors of personality of administrators in public schools of JAVADABAD has also confirmed this result.

Given the significant number of test at 99% confidence level, it can be said public schools administrators of JAVADABAD are mostly extroverts, characterized by agreeableness, people with high conscientiousness who have high emotional stability and characterized by openness to experience at the appropriate level as well.

5.3. Test Research Hypotheses

To investigate the relationship between personality traits f administrators and teachers' empowerment, Spearman correlation coefficient test is used:

Table 4. The results of Spearmen correlation test.

As it can be seen in Table 5, in general, there is no significant relationship between personality traits of administrators and teachers' empowerment and among the five factors of personality there is only a significant relationship between the characteristic of administrators' agreeableness and teachers' empowerment. The output of LISREL software (Figure 2) in the mode of significance numbers alsoconfirms the absence of a significant relationship between the two main variables.

Fig. 2. The model of significance numbers of research hypotheses.

6. Conclusion

In this study, the relationship between personality traits of administrators and teachers' empowerment were examined in public schools. As noted there was no significant relationship between personality traits of administrators and teachers' empowerment were examined in public schools, while it seems that the administrators characterized by extraversion and openness to experience are more sensitive to their employees' empowerment, but it was not approved in public schools. One reason of the lack of relationship may be searched in characteristics of educational structure governing the public schools. In our educational system, it is often trying to manage and lead by applying rules and regulations and instead of relying on research and accessing guiding theoretical frameworks, the provision of standard methods and procedures to manage educational activities is emphasized. These criteria put administrators in a position to do the things that need to be done, But if administrators are trained to perform the duties of leadership and management and have intellectual foundations or a valid theoretical framework, then based on recognition and identification, they will know what they can do in practical situations and how they can carry out their duties better and more efficiently. These rules, procedures and rules especially in public schools are implemented with less flexibility. So studying the relationship between personality traits of administrators and teachers' empowerment in private schools and private educational institutions could be the aim of researcher in future studies.

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