Teachers’ opinions about power sources in schools

Administrators, in order to be effective to realize the organizational goals, should have power to influence them. Power is divided into two in itself as formal and informal power. These may cause either the maintenance or disappearance of organizations, and during this process it is mainly the employees and secondly the stakeholders who are affected. When schools are considered as organizations, the administrators themselves, teachers, students, parents, and other related people are either positively or negatively affected by the existence of this power. Within this framework, the aim of this study is to investigate teachers’ opinions about power sources in schools. To achieve this purpose a case study model was used, a sample from the study was selected, and an appropriate sampling model was used. The study group consisted of 31 teachers, who participated in the study voluntarily. Some of the findings of the study reveal that teachers mostly consider school principals as a formal power and parents as an informal power, and they believe that parents have an influence on the school administration. They also believe that the relationship between the informal power and formal power is influenced when the interests of both sides are concerned. © Kamla-Raj 2016.