The relation between school leadership from a distributed perspective and teachers' organizational commitment: examining the source of the leadership function

Purpose: In this study the relationship between school leadership and teachers’ organizational commitment is examined by taking into account a distributed leadership perspective. The relation between teachers’ organizational commitment and contextual variables of teachers’ perceptions of the quality and the source of the supportive and supervisory leadership function, participative decision making, and cooperation within the leadership team are examined. Research Design: A survey was set up involving 1,522 teachers from 46 large secondary schools in Flanders (Belgium). Because the data in the present study have an inherent hierarchical structure, that is, teachers are nested into schools, hierarchical linear modeling techniques are applied. Findings: The analyses reveal that 9% of the variance in teachers’ organizational commitment is attributable to differences between schools. Teachers’ organizational commitment is mainly related to quality of the supportive leadership, cooperation within the leadership team, and participative decision making. Who performed the supportive leadership function plays only a marginally significant positive role. The quality of the supervisory leadership function and the role of the leadership team members in this function were not significantly related to teachers’ organizational commitment. Conclusions: The implications of the findings are that to promote teachers’ organizational commitment teachers should feel supported by their leadership team and that this leadership team should be characterized by group cohesion, role clarity, and goal orientedness. Recommendations for further research are provided

The Relationship between Servant Leadership, Affective Commitment: Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Team Effectiveness

The goal of the study was to conduct an analysis of the relationships between servant leadership, affective team commitment, OCB and team effectiveness in the South African school system. A non-probability sample made up of 288 school teachers was drawn from 38 schools in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Item analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used to analyse the data. Positive relationships were found between servant leadership and team effectiveness; servant leadership and affective team commitment, affective team commitment and team effectiveness, servant leadership and OCB; affective team commitment and OCB; and OCB and team effectiveness

The Role of Opportunistic Punishment in the Evolution of Cooperation: An application of stochastic dynamics to public good game

This paper discusses the role of opportunistic punisher who may act selfishly to free-ride cooperators or not to be exploited by defectors. To consider opportunistic punisher, we make a change to the sequence of one-shot public good game; instead of putting action choice first before punishment, the commitment of punishment is declared first before choosing the action of each participant. In this commitment-first setting, punisher may use information about her team, and may defect to increase her fitness in the team. Reversing sequence of public good game can induce different behavior of punisher, which cannot be considered in standard setting where punisher always chooses cooperation. Based on stochastic dynamics developed by evolutionary economists and biologists, we show that opportunistic punisher can make cooperation evolve where cooperative punisher fails. This alternative route for the evolution of cooperation relies paradoxically on the players' selfishness to profit from others' unconditional cooperation and defection.Comment: 30 page, 9 figure

How Team-Level and Individual-Level Conflict Influences Team Commitment: A Multilevel Investigation

We investigate how two different types of conflict (task conflict and relationship conflict) at two different levels (individual-level and team-level) influence individual team commitment. The analysis was conducted using data we collected from 193 employees in 31 branch offices of a Korean commercial bank. The relationships at multiple levels were tested using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). The results showed that individual-level relationship conflict was negatively related to team commitment while individual-level task conflict was not. In addition, both team-level task and relationship conflict were negatively associated with team commitment. Finally, only team-level relationship conflict significantly moderated the relationship between individual-level relationship conflict and team commitment. We further derive theoretical implications of these findings

The Effects of Team Flow on Performance: A Video Game Experiment

Research on effective team work has traditionally explained team performance as a result of team cohesion and goal commitment. Team cohesion was originally defined as the general level of attraction the team members had to all others in their group. This social relations-based concept of team cohesion is generally a strong indicator of team performance. However, more recent research has stressed the importance of incorporating the team members’ mutual level of commitment to the team task as another sub-dimension of cohesion. When including task commitment, team cohesion is a somewhat weaker predictor of team performance (Beal et al., 2003). To better conceptualize the role of the task engagement and to explain team performance, we incorporate a variable more relevant to the characteristics of a team task: team flow. The concept of “flow” has been well researched and theorized at the individual level. However, in an experiment based on collaborative video gaming, we demonstrate that not only can flow be extended to the team level to better explain performance, but that teams can quickly generate a psychological flow state from low cost treatments like collaborative video gaming which can also be effectively transferred into subsequent work tasks

COMMITMENT TO TEAM GOALS IN SPORT: ADAPTATION OF GOAL COMMITMENT SCALE TO SPORT FIELD

The aim of this study was to revise Goal Commitment Scale, developed by Hollenbeck, Williams and Klein (1989) with 9 items, revised by Klein, Wesson, Hollenbeck and Wright (2001) to 5 items and adapted to Turkish by Şenel and Yıldız (2016) to measure commitment to team goals and analyze validation and reliability in a sample including athletes. The Turkish version of the 5-item Goal Commitment Scale was revised by taking expert opinion to measure commitment to team goals. The Revised form was sent to at least 2-year licensed athletes on the Internet, and data was collected from 400 athletes. The data were examined and 25 improper data were excluded. Collected data were analyzed in SPSS by using Exploratory Factor Analysis and in AMOS (Analysis of Moment Structure) program by using Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Results showed that the revised commitment scale that measures commitment to team goals could be used for samples including athletes.   Article visualizations