High school teachers’ perceptions regarding principals’ ethical leadership in Turkey

This study has been carried out in order to determine to what extent principals demonstrate ethical leadership behaviors, and to present suggestions on the strength of these findings. The study has a descriptive quality in evaluating the teachers' perceptions and uses the Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS) developed by Yilmaz (2006), so as to determine the opinions of the participant teachers. The analysis of the data has been performed via the "SPSS for Windows" package program. In addition, such statistical processes as a significance test, standard deviation, one-way variance analysis (ANOVA), Kruskal-Wallis H Test, Mann-Whitney U Test have also been carried out. The findings reveal that principals "adequately" perform their ethical responsibilities like treating their staff justly and encouraging them, being fair, understanding, patient and humble, traits which all exist in the "communicative ethics, climatic ethics and ethics in decision making" levels at the state high schools in the city of Kutahya, Turkey. On the other hand, the participant teachers in the study have clearly admitted that the principals engaged in such ethical behaviors in the "behavioral ethics" level as self-evaluation, not lying and protecting individual rights "poorly." (Contains 5 tables.)