| Organizational literature has recognized leadership as an essential element in determining organizational climate as well as productivity (Griffith, 1999). Litwin (1968) suggested that organizational climate is an important variable in the study of human organizations and that through deeper understanding of this variable we will gain understanding about how different leadership styles impact the people within an organization, organizational performance, and organizational health.; In this context this present study sought to determine the current working conditions of middle schools within the state of Washington, as well as to examine the relationship between teacher working conditions as evidenced by the constructs of organizational climate and health with emotional intelligence competencies, viewed as internal thought processes, of the principals of those schools.; Using a causal-comparative survey research design, teachers in sixty randomly selected middle schools within the state of Washington were asked to complete at a regularly scheduled faculty meeting, the Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire for Middle Schools (OCDQ-RM), or the Organizational Health Inventory for Middle Schools (OHI-M). The principals of those schools were asked to complete the Emotional Competence Inventory 2.0 (ECI 2.0), a questionnaire designed to assess 18 competencies under four dimensions of emotional intelligence. Descriptive statistics were computed for each factor of school climate and health from teacher responses to the two questionnaires. Nonparametric statistics were computed using Kendall's tau to determine the strength of association between all climate and health factors, with the 18 emotional intelligence competencies.; While several relationships were found, one significant relationship was notable; that of the emotional intelligence competency of transparency with the organizational climate component of teacher openness. Transparency is defined as maintaining standards of honesty and integrity, and teacher openness is a summary measure that includes teacher commitment to student social and academic success, teacher collegiality among colleagues, and teacher disengagement. While the nonexperimental nature of this study does not allow conclusions of causality to be drawn, the moderately strong relationship, tau = .651, p < .05, two-tailed, appears to suggest that as leaders display authentic behaviors consistently over time, this could have a positive impact on subordinates, as well as the organizational environment within a school. |
