Research Information System
Current Psychology, vol.43, no.44, pp.34335-34351, 2024 (SSCI, Scopus)
Schools in Türkiye are operated by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE). MoNE frequently implements legal, structural, and curricular changes to alter the running of schools. Resistance to change has become a noticeable issue among Turkish teachers. Based on this background, we investigated the relationship between teachers’ perceived organizational support and resistance to change, and the mediating effects of climate for initiative and psychological safety in this relationship. The perceived organizational support theory was used to explain the relationship between MoNE’s supportive actions and teachers’ resistance tendencies. We employed the sense-making theory to explain how teachers evaluate school climates and task uncertainty. We tested the relationships between the study variables and task uncertainty due to its central role in the sense-making theory. A total of 380 teachers participated in this cross-sectional study. Structural equation modeling was employed to analyze direct and indirect relationships between the variables. We found that perceived organizational support was not significantly related to resistance to change but negatively influenced it through climate for initiative and psychological safety. The findings showed that task uncertainty was positively related to perceived organizational support and climate for initiative but was not significantly related to psychological safety and resistance to change. Our findings pointed to the potential of perceived organizational support to alleviate teachers’ resistance to change. Furthermore, the training of school administrators for favorable treatment of teachers, fair implementation of change policies, and the transparency of decision-making before and during the implementation of change policies were recommended.