Teachers’ Personal and Team Empowerment and Their Relations to Organizational Outcomes: Contradictory or Compatible Constructs?

Abstract

To date most models of empowerment have focused on teachers’ personal empowerment, which is defined as intrinsic task motivation reflecting an employee’s orientation to his or her work role. Interestingly, little scholarly attention has been turned to the interaction of empowerment and work-team membership, that is, to empowerment acquired from work in an empowered team. The study reported here juxtaposed these two forms of empowerment—personal and team—in an integrated model of organizational outputs (performance, organizational commitment, and professional commitment). The results from a sample of 983 teachers at 25 middle schools and 27 high schools indicated that teachers’ performance benefited most from the joint effect of high personal empowerment and team empowerment. Organizational commitment gained from high personal empowerment and team empowerment, as well as from low/high interaction; and professional commitment benefited most from high personal empowerment/low team empowerment or low personal empowerment/high team empowerment.

The Role of Leader Empowering Behaviours in Psychological Contract at High Schools

“…Güçlendirici liderlik davranışlarının okullardaki yansımalarını ele alan çalışmalarda, öğretmenler tarafından algılanan güçlendirme ile örgütsel vatandaşlık davranışları arasında pozitif anlamlı bir ilişkinin olduğu (Günbayı, Dağlı ve Kalkan, 2013), çalışan güçlendirmenin bağlılık ve iş performansını olumlu yönde etkilediği tespit edilmiştir (Somech, 2005;Şama ve Kolamaz, 2011;Gümüş, 2013). Bu bulgulara paralel olarak yapılan nitel bir çalışma güçlendirici liderlik davranışlarının, öğretmenlerin okul içi ilişkilerinin, mesleğe yönelik tutum ve duygularının olumlu yönde gelişmesinde etkili olduğunu ortaya çıkarmıştır (Argon, 2014).…”

Social-cognitive outcomes of teachers’ engagement in learning communities

“…Organizational commitment among teachers has long been recognized as an effective route toward a school's success (Fink, 1992;Somech, 2005), and studies have indicated that commitment is a critical predictor for teachers' quality of work performance (Dee et al, 2006). Employees' organizational commitment is generally defined as "the relative strength of an individual's identification with and involvement in a particular organization" (Mowday et al, 1982, p. 27).…”

“…Specifically, a strong sense of impact is equivalent to teachers' beliefs that their efforts positively affect their students' learning and that they are capable of affecting colleagues' choices, behaviors, and their schools' strategies (Bogler and Nir, 2012;Short, 1994;Short and Rinehart, 1992). Also, as demonstrated in social-psychology research in teacher settings, impact supports a range of attitudinal work effectiveness criteria (Somech, 2005;Somech and Drach-Zahavy, 2007). Therefore, this study suggests that teachers' sense of impact is an important product of their social learning behavior, which is likely to support their work in the classroom.…”

Beyond individualism and isolation in schools: What types of teacher teams are there in schools? Or can we merely speak about groups?

“…A vast amount of studies were more exploratory in nature and did not start off by giving a definition of "teams" but described the teams under study (e.g. Gunn & King, 2003;Hackmann, Petzko, Valentine, Clark, Nori, & Lucas, 2002;Meirink, Imants, Meijer, & Verloop, 2010;Somech, 2005). Even authors that focused on other denominations often seemed to use the term "team" somewhere in their article: some studies started off by writing about "collaboration", "community", "department" or "critical friends group" and then later on referred to "teams" (mostly as a form of collaboration) without giving further explanation (e.g.…”

“…Most other studies seem to refer to teams that are more long-term (a temporal duration of the collaboration is not given), except for Drach-Zahavy and Somech (2002) and Somech (2005) who mentioned that the teams under study already worked together for at least one year.…”