The Degree to Which School’s Principal Practices Behaviors That Build or Destroy Teachers’ Trust in Her in Cycle One Abu-Dhabi City Schools: Teachers’ Perspective.

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the degree of which cycle-one school principals practice behaviors that build or destroy teachers trust in them from teachers’ perspective in light of some demographic variables in public schools in Abu Dhabi City through answering the following research questions: 1. To what degree cycle one school principals in Abu Dhabi city practice behaviors that build or destroy teachers’ trust in them from the teachers’ perspectives? 2. Are there significant mean differences in teachers perceptions at the significant level (ἁ = 0.05) about the degree to which principals practice behaviors that build or destroy teachers’ trust in them according to teacher’ nationality, teachers’ year of experience and years of working with the principal? To achieve the research aim and answer its question the researcher developed an instrument based on literature review and previous studies; the research instrument consisted of 53 five point Likert scale questions representing five main dimensions of trust: benevolence, openness, reliability, honesty and competence. Validity of the instrument was tested through presenting it to a panel of experts ion the field of education; reliability coefficient Cronbach alpha was used to test the instrument reliability, the reliability coefficient for the questions related to principals’ behaviors that build trust was 0.959 and it was 0.945 for the questions related to principals’ behaviors that destroy trust at all dimensions. A convenience sample technique was used to choose the study sample, 178 female teachers participated in the study which constitute 16% of the total population. The study has reached to the following results: The degree to which principals practice behaviors that build teachers’ trust in them is high and the degree to which the practice behaviors that destroy teachers’ trust in them is low from teachers’ perspectives. There are no significant mean differences in teachers’ perceptions about the degree principals practice behaviors that build teachers trust in them on the whole instrument or any of its dimensions according to their nationality. There are significant mean differences in teachers’ perceptions about the degree principals’ practice behaviors that destroy trust on the whole instrument and each of its dimensions attributed to their nationality with higher means for Arabic nationality teachers. There are no significant mean differences in teachers’ perceptions about the degree principals practice behaviors that build and destroy teachers trust in them on the whole instrument or any of its dimensions according to their experience. There are significant mean differences in teachers’ perceptions about the degree principals’ practice behaviors that build and destroy trust according to the years of working with the principal on the openness and consistence dimensions, while there were no significant mean differences on the benevolence, honesty and competence dimensions