The Effects of Vocational High School Teachers’ Perceived Trust on Organizational Silence

The objective of this research is to reveal the effects of vocational school teachers' perceived organizational trust on organizational silence. For this purpose, at first teachers' perception on sub-dimensions of organizational silence and organizational trust, which are respectively "acquiescent silence," "defensive silence," "prosocial silence" and "sensibility to employees," "trust to administrator," "openness to modernity," "communication climate," is tried to be identified. Then, the relationship among the sub-dimensions of organizational silence and organizational trust is determined. The research is conducted in correlational survey model. The research population consists of 293 teachers working in five vocational and technical high schools located in central Usak province. Since the study is limited to vocational and technical high school teachers and sample size is not so large, no sampling is done and the scale is applied to all teachers. 160 (54.6%) out of 183 (62.4%) returned scales are evaluated after eliminating 23 incorrectly filled scales. During the study two different scales is used to gather data. One of them is "Organizational Trust Scale," developed by Daboval, et al. (1994), adopted to Turkish by Kamer (2001) and adopted to educational institutions by Yilmaz (2005) and, the other one is "Organizational Silence Scale," developed by Dyne, Ang & Botero (2003) and adopted to Turkish by Erdogan (2011). The findings are revealed that vocational high school teachers' perception about organizational trust is at high level, while their organizational silence behavior is at medium level. Moreover, a significant and two-way relationship between organizational trust and organizational silence is found.