The increasing emergence of participation in decision making (PDM) in schools reflects the widely shared belief that flatter management and decentralized authority structures carry the potential for promoting school effectiveness. However, the literature indicates a discrepancy between the intuitive appeal of PDM and empirical evidence in respect…

Purpose: The current literature's call for a more ecological approach to violence theory, research, and practice stimulated the current study. This model postulates that teachers' willingness to engage in behaviors intended to tackle violence in school as part of their in-role duties (role breadth) will affect school violence. Specifically, the…

Purpose: Although conflict has traditionally been considered destructive, recent studies have indicated that conflict management can contribute to effective teamwork. The present study explores conflict management as a team phenomenon in schools. The author examined how the contextual variables (task interdependence, goal interdependence) are…

Purpose: The success of schools fundamentally depends on teachers' willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty, namely, to exhibit organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Attempts to understand the causes of OCB frequently focus on individual characteristics; only recently have researchers begun to direct their attention to more…

Purpose: Most writings on Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) to date have focused on analysis at the individual level and paid less attention to other analytical frameworks at the group level (i.e., team, unit, or organization). This article approaches OCB from the less conventional perspective of group-level activities and uses it to…

Purpose: The contingency model theory suggests that the effects of a leadership style cannot be studied without explicit attention to the given situation. Accordingly, the authors propose a model that allows them to examine simultaneously the relative impact of participative leadership and directive leadership on teachers' performance through the…

To date most models of empowerment have focused on teachers' personal empowerment, which is defined as intrinsic task motivation reflecting an employee's orientation to his or her work role. Interestingly, little scholarly attention has been turned to the interaction of empowerment and work-team membership, that is, to empowerment acquired from…

Purpose: The educational literature reflects the widely shared belief that participative leadership has an overwhelming advantage over the contrasting style of directive leadership in organizational and team effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to examine the relative effect of a directive leadership approach as compared with a…

Uses sample of 99 elementary principals in Israel to examine simultaneously 5 dimensions of participative management: decision domain, degree of participation, structure, target of participation, and rationale. Finds, for example, that principals tend to involve teachers more in the technical domain than the managerial domain. (Contains 76…

Examines the relationship of teacher professional and organizational commitment with participation in decision making and organizational citizenship behavior in Israel. Finds, for example, that teachers with high commitment to their organization and/or their profession report that they are more engaged in organizational citizenship behavior than…

Examines 94 Israeli elementary school principals's work behavior, using a structured observation technique. Principals exhibited certain work characteristics (brevity, variety, fragmentation) supported in other research. They differed from conventional job descriptions in demonstrating internally oriented social (but not political) inclinations,…