PARTICIPATORY MANAGEMENT AND IRANIAN EFL TEACHERS’ JOB SATISFACTION AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT

One of the ways to make a school or an educational setting work more effectively is to create an attitude of cooperation and a sense of commitment and satisfaction within the organization [74]. The objectives of this mixed-method study was to explore the effect of shared decision making on Iranian EFL teachers’ senses of job satisfaction and commitment and to identify their opinion on shared leadership. The nonequivalent groups’ pretest posttest design examined the perceptions job satisfaction and organizational commitment through 40 available EFL teachers from an Institute in Mashhad, Iran, who compromised the experimental and control groups. The data collection process consisted of two modified surveys (Spector’s Job Satisfaction Scale and Balfour and Wechsler’s Organizational Commitment Scale) that included Likert-type survey questions, in conjunction with an individual Demographic Survey and semi-structural interviews. The quantitative data were analysed in SPSS 22 to address the objectives of the study. The findings indicated that those EFL teachers who participated in the process of decision-making felt significantly more satisfied with work than those who did not share their ideas with the institute’s authorities; whereas the EFL teachers participating in the process of decision making did not project a significantly deeper sense of commitment to work compared with those who did not share their ideas. In addition, the result from the interviews surfaced the fact that EFL teachers were willing to take on more responsibilities and share their ideas with co-workers and the principals on a regular basis.