Teachers’ Organizational Communication and Their Job Motivation

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of teachers’ organizational communication on their job motivation. The research model is correlational survey model. The participants of the study are 111 teachers working at public elementary schools in Turkey. Organizational Communication Scale and Job Motivation Scale are used as data collection instruments. For data analysis, Pearson correlation analysis and basic linear regression analysis are applied with SPSS. The findings of the study showed that teachers’ organizational communication and job motivation levels are at high level. Also, it is determined that there is a positive, high and significant relationship between teachers’ organizational communication and their job motivation. Besides, teachers’ organizational communication significantly predicts their job motivation. The findings of this study are discussed with related researches and some suggestions are presented.


Job Motivation
Motivation, a recently popular concept for social sciences, has its roots in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Relevant literature is full of definitions of motivation (Arifin, 2015;Kearney, 2018;Lazaroiu, 2015;Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2018). A simple definition can be 'a drive to do something'. Regarding Maslow's pyramid model, when a human being desires to get one more step for his/her needs, this a beginning point of being motivated to do something. A more comprehensive definition of motivation is given by Timuroğlu and Balkaya (2016) as follows: Motivation is a set of internal or external drives directing a person to a target or enabling a person to act towards a desired goal; or enabling him/her sustain the action to reach a desired goal. There are two types of motivation regarding its source: internal and external motivation. Sense of responsibility, success, personal development or self-fulfillment are the main factors of internal motivation. Internal motivation is identified with being voluntary for a job. The factors of external motivation are wage, salary or other financial expectations, promotion, desire of being appreciated by the employer. Job motivation is internal or external incentive of a person in an organization. This incentive enables the person to hold persistence to overcome the difficulties as well as encouraging to reach the goals. There is no doubt that job motivation has a positive effect on job performance and personal accomplishment level (Tentama & Pranungsari, 2016). There are several studies which aimed to explore the relationship between job motivation and decision making levels of teachers (Özdoğru & Aydın, 2012); job satisfaction (Bishay, 1996); school leadership and reactions to policies (Leithwood, Steinbach, & Jantzi, 2002); school based performance awards (Kelley, Heneman, & Milanowski, 2002); burnout (Anderson & Iwanicki, 1984); school based variables (Ayaydın & Tok, 2015); and organizational commitment (Oran, Güler, & Bilir, 2016).
Based on the theory of Barnard (1938) which suggest that personal motivation leads authentic communication enabling the continuity of communication, Lu (2003) points that motivation has a positive effect on informal organizational communication, thus, organizational communication should be regarded as a key concept. Research on investigating the effect of positive communication in increasing motivation has focused on call centers (Özkan, 2013), banking (Yoo, Flaherty, & Frankwick, 2014), and nurses and other health employees (Cherry, Ashcraft, & Owen, 2007;Timuroğlu & Balkaya, 2016).
Studies on teachers' job motivations and organizational communication is rather limited (Özgan & Aslan, 2008;Park & Rainey, 2012). Most of the studies have been devoted to explore the relationship between teachers' job motivations and organizational commitment, job satisfaction and leadership styles (Arifin, 2015;Girma, 2016;Terek et al., 2015).

Purpose of the Study
Current study is expected to shed light on the relationship between teachers' job motivation and organizational communication. This research targets to investigate the effects of teachers' organizational communication on their job motivation. For this reason, following questions are tried to be answered in this study: a) What are the levels of teachers' organizational communication and job motivation? b) Is there any relationship between teachers' organizational communication and job motivation? c) Do teachers' organizational communication significantly predict their job motivation?

Research Model
In the present study, it is aimed to determine the effects of teachers' organizational communication on their job motivation by examining the relationship between teachers' organizational communication and their job motivation. For this purpose, correlational survey model is used.

Participants
One hundred eleven teachers who are working at public primary schools in one of the provinces of Turkey are recruited for this study. The gender distribution of the participants consists of 72 (64.9%) female and 39 (35.1%) male. In terms of teachers' professional degree, 23 (20.7%) of whom have 1-5 years seniority, 28 (25.2%) of whom have 6-10 years seniority, 32 (28.8%) of whom have 11-15 years seniority, 20 (18%) of whom have 16-20 years seniority, 8 (7.2%) of whom have 21 years and more seniority. Additionally, 99 (89.2%) of teachers are B.A. holders and 12 (10.8%) of them are holding a graduate degree.

Data Collection Instruments
In this study, Organizational Communication Scale is used for collecting data to determine the teachers' organizational communication levels and Job Motivation Scale is used for collecting data to determine the teachers' job motivation levels.

Organizational Communication Scale
In order to determine the level of teachers' organizational communication level, Organizational Communication Scale which is developed by Celep (2000) and reliability and validity analysis conducted by Erel Yetim (2010) is used. This scale is composed of 34 items with five Likert-type grades. It includes four sub dimensions which are called as task-oriented communication, informative communication, feedback and communication towards attitude and behavior. In this research, it is found that Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient that belongs to scale is .99. On the other hand, Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient that belongs to dimensions is found that reliability coefficient for task-oriented communication is .93, reliability coefficient for informative communication is .97, reliability coefficient for feedback is .95 and reliability coefficient for communication towards attitude and behavior is .97.

Job Motivation Scale
To determine the level of teachers' job motivation level, Job Motivation Scale that is developed by Aksoy (2006) and adapted to educational organizations by Tanrıverdi (2007) is used. This scale is composed of 18 items with five Likert-type grades. This scale is a unidimensional. Cronbach alpha coefficient of the scale is found .98.

Data Analysis
In the analysis of data gathered for the present study, mean, standard deviation, frequency, and percentage, correlation analysis, simple and multiple linear regression analysis are used. Before correlation analysis and regression analysis between the variations are carried out, analysis of missing data and outliers are handled, normality, linearity and the problem of multicollinearity are examined. To test whether the set of data is normally distributed, coefficient of kurtosis and coefficient of skewness are employed. In the present study, the coefficient of skewness of the organizational communication is found as -0.72. In terms of sub dimensions of organizational communication, the coefficient of skewness is found as -0.99 for task-oriented communication, -0.79 for informative communication, -0.85 for feedback and -0.78 for communication towards attitude and behavior. Additionally, the coefficient of kurtosis of the organizational communication is found as -0.19. On the other hand, the coefficient of kurtosis regarding sub dimensions of organizational communication is found as 0.49 for task-oriented communication, -0.05 for informative communication, -0.02 for feedback and -0.29 for communication towards attitude and behavior.
When coefficient of skewness regarding job motivation is checked, it is found as -0.60. Addition to these statistical data, the coefficient of kurtosis regarding job motivation is found as -0.74. According to these findings, the data can be accepted as normally distributed. To determine whether there is multicollinearity problem between variables, the binary correlation between independent variables and dependent variables are investigated and it is found that the variables aren't too highly correlated to create problems related to multicollinearity.

Results
Descriptive statistics related to variables of the present study and the relationships between these variables are shown in Table 1.  As shown in Table 5, according to the perceptions of teachers, there is a significant relationship between organizational communication and job motivation (R=0.81, R 2 =0.66, p<0.01). The predictive power of organizational communication for job motivation is found statistically significant and organizational communication explains the variance of job motivation at level of 66 %.

Conclusion, Discussion and Recommendations
The aim of this paper is to determine the effects of teachers' organizational communication on their job motivation by examining the relationship between teachers' organizational communication and their job motivation levels. The results of the present study indicate that there is a positive, high level and significant relationship between teachers' organizational and their job motivation. Additionally, teachers' perceptions regarding organizational communication play a significant role as a predictor of teachers' perceptions regarding job motivation.