Effects of Transformational and Instructional Leadership on Organizational Silence and Attractiveness and Their Importance for the Sustainability of Educational Institutions

Managers are expected to carry various leadership qualities in order to raise the human profiles (professionals) required by society. Leadership becomes even more important when it comes to education as it shapes our future. In educational institutions, especially transformational leadership (TL) and instructional leadership (IL) have a particular importance and play an active role in conveying a classical managerial approach. This as well influences the sustainability of the educational institutions. The managers with these two leadership qualities will contribute to a reduction in their employees' perceptions of organizational silence (OS) and an increase in the perception of organizational attractiveness (OA). In this paper, we analyzed the effects of transformational and instructional leadership styles of the managers of high schools, which contain the aviation field of study, and their effects on organizational attractiveness and organizational silence. The universe of this study is 1537 teachers working in 21 public high schools in the 2017-2018 academic year in Turkey, and the sample is 749 teachers who responded to the survey. We used a relational model of quantitative research methods. In this study, the Transformational Leadership Scale and the Instructional Leadership Scale were used to determine the leadership styles of the managers according to the perceptions of the teachers, while the Organizational Attractiveness Scale and the Organizational Silence Scale were used to determine the perceived organizational attractiveness and organizational silence of the teachers. Within the scope of reliability analysis, all dimensions of the scales used were found to be reliable. SPSS 24.0 and LISREL 8.1 package programs were used in the analysis of the research data and the relations between the variables were examined by using the Structural Equation Model. As the main finding is the existence of correlation of the elements, specifically, it was found that transformational and instructional leadership have positive effect with same-direction on organizational attractiveness, positive effect with inverse-direction on organizational silence, as well as positive effect with inverse-direction between organizational silence and organizational attractiveness. These findings provide an additional layer of factors to be analyzed that might affect the sustainability of educational institutions. We propose further studies to be carried out on development of new correlation models between sustainability elements on one side, and organizational silence or organizational attractiveness on the other.