Conference Agenda

Purpose of the Study

Organizational behavior research in educational settings has long shown that employee working conditions significantly influence employees’ productivity, and work attitudes such as sense of belonging and organizational identification (Bluedorn, 1982; Darling-Hammond, 2003; Ingersoll, 2001; Kalleberg & Mastekaasa, 1998; Mueller & Price, 1990; Price & Mobley, 1983). Poor organizational and working conditions such as work overload, lack of school administrative support contributed to poor teacher well-being and high teacher turnover (Hascher & Waber, 2021). Recent pandemic has also diminished the quality of working conditions at schools and increased the organizational stressors for the educational workforce worldwide (Kraft, Simon, & Lyon, 2020; OECD, 2020).

Diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds of teachers and the degree of conflict within the school further complicated working conditions and created management issues for educational leaders (D’Netto & Sohal, 1999; Hurst et al., 2012). Workforce diversity can generate both advantages and disadvantages for organizations in the same organizational system. Research on diverse work environments shows that such diversity creates better decision-making processes in organizations, greater creativity and innovation, and increased global competitiveness (Jauhari & Singh, 2013). However, it may also lead to increased conflict, communication breakdown, less productivity, low cohesion, reduced organizational commitment, and high turnover (Duyar et al., 2015).

United Arab Emirates is one of the most multicultural environments in the world. Schools in the United Arab Emirates embrace principals and teachers who come from diverse ethnic, citizenship and cultural backgrounds and bring different work attitudes and behaviors to the schools where they work (Malik & Singh, 2017). Effective management of a diverse workforce in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) presents a peculiar importance as two-thirds of residents are expatriates, who have diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. There is a need for studies that examine how educational leaders manage diversity and whether their CQ have any influence on teachers’ organizational identification. The purpose of this study was to comparatively examine the direct and indirect influence of principals’ CQ on teachers’ organizational identification with diverse national backgrounds.

Research Questions

The study attempted to address the following research questions:

1. Does teachers’ citizenship status pose a differentiating factor of their organizational identification?
2. Does principals’ citizenship status pose a differentiating factor of their cultural intelligence?
3. Holding teacher, principal, and school level demographic attributes constant, does principals’ cultural intelligence significantly influence teachers’ organizational identification?

Theoretical Framework

The Social Identity Theory (SIT) and the Cultural intelligence Theory (CINT) guided this study. The social identity theory is part of an individual’s self-concept that comes from his/her knowledge of belonging to a group or groups (Tajfel, 1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Knippenberg and Schie asserted that emotional significance accompanies this type of membership which leads to the notion of social identification (2000). The perception of oneness as a group member is the essence of the perceptual, attitudinal, and behavioral effects of group membership (Knippenberg & Schie, 2000). Moreover, the more one envisions himself or herself in terms of the membership of a group, the more one identifies with that group, the more one’s attitudes and behaviors are ruled by that group (Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Knippenberg & Schie, 2000).

The cultural intelligence theory is emerged as a novel perspective in response to the realities of globalization and the increased diversity in today’s organizations (Collins et al., 2016). This theory is a viable entrée from which global business leaders can “see beyond surface-level cultural differences” (Earley & Ang, 2003, p. 29). Cultural intelligence is defined as “an individual’s capability to function and manage effectively in culturally diverse settings (Earley & Ang, 2003, p. 336).

Educational research has traditionally focused on trying to answer two basic questions: 1) which educational policies improve children's participation in the educational process and 2) which educational policies improve the quality of education offered to children.

Recent developments, changes and reforms in European education systems dictate the necessity of new approaches to investigating factors that significantly influence the process of school improvement. Undoubtedly, school culture has been at the heart of a variety of educational researches considered as a systemic factor of school improvement and school’s self-development. Until recently, educational research has tended to identify it as positive/non-toxic, negative/toxic and categorise it according to a variety of criteria, formulating this way different models of school culture. The systems approach defines it as an emergent phenomenon shaped by the decision-making processes and the decision-making premises which contribute to the absorption of uncertainty in every system’s structure but not in every function of the system.

The systems approach adopted in this research focuses on the definition and the specification of decision and non-decision premises in three domains, in the area of programmatic decisions, communication channels and personnel. It treats school culture as a phenomenon that is influenced and therefore shaped by these factors but at the same time feeds back on them, making it specific, unique and different in each school unit. It is argued, that school culture is utilized as a means of the autopoietic process of the system, the process of change, evolution and improvement of an educational organization developing at the same time double contingency relationships.

The autopoietic nature of the organisation differentiates the internal dimension of culture that emerges within the system, from another possible dimension of culture which may 'communicate' with and influence the external environment of the organisational system.

The complexity in the structure of an educational organisation does not allow the development of a homogeneous order of meaning. The presence of different groups shapes a dynamic that in turn develops complex 'patterns' and combinations of subcultures. This characteristic of school organisations intensifies the need for a systems approach, while the qualitative and complex dimension of school culture dictates the need for school culture itself to be explored as an emerging and evolving phenomenon.

The need to investigate school culture based on systems theory dictated the development of a qualitative research methodology that focuses on exploring the three factors influencing and shaping the emerging phenomenon of school culture and particularly that which is developed by the teacher and school management.

The purpose of this paper is to study the validity and reliability of a research tool which aims at qualitatively observing and investigating teacher’s school culture through conditions of system decisions and therefore influencing the self-evaluation and self-improvement process.

The disconnect between research and practice is a global phenomenon. Research-practice partnerships (RPP) are a relatively new type of collaboration between educators and researchers that are seen as a possible solution to this problem. The diversity of the team composition should support the emergence of new ideas and solutions to existing problems. In RPPs, researchers and educators create meaningful, trusting partnerships to address urgent problems of practice: “These partnerships are intentionally organized to connect diverse forms of expertise and shift power relations in the research endeavor to ensure that all partners have a say in the joint work” (Farrell et al., 2021, p. iv).

As RPPs deliberately bring together people with varied expertise, communication is a critical issue (Farrell et al., 2021). As Brown and Allen (2021) state, “Practitioners and researchers live in different professional worlds, each with its own institutional language and norms, hierarchies, incentive systems, and approaches to solving problems” (p. 21). Partners often need to navigate different timelines, communication tools, and ways of describing their work (Denner et al., 2019; Penuel et al., 2015). Learning can occur in part through generative dialogue within RPP space. However, we have little information on how discourse unfolds in RPPs.

There are discourse characteristics likely to be common in generative discourse in education: (1) revealing problems from teaching practice, (2) providing evidence or reasoning, (3) making connections to general principles, (4) building on others’ ideas so members may have a shared frame of reference, and (5) offering different perspectives to be able to understand a problem in a new way (Lefstein et al., 2020, pp. 8–10). It is useful to examine whether these and other characteristics of generative discourse are present in RPPs.

The RPP in this study is embedded in a project “Participative School Improvement - Improve Instruction with students” using a design-based research approach (Fishman & Penuel, 2018). The aim of the project is to develop, implement, and routinize participatory settings where students can express their needs and form the learning context of their school. The project aims to change school practices based upon student participation. Our approach is based on practice theory where “bundles of practices and arrangements are the central unit of conceptuality and analysis of social life and social phenomena” (Schatzki, 2019, p. 27). The implication of this theoretical approach is that to better understand school improvement and changes in schools, we need to study everyday practice in situ (Little, 2012; Maag Merki & Werner, 2013; Spillane, 2012) as they are carried out in everyday life.

Team meetings are an important part of everyday practice in schools and in RPPs. Since the RPP is new for both educators and researchers, new routines for collaboration must be established. Most studies analyzing collaborative discourse understand learning as a social process and emphasize a strong interdependence between learning and discourse (Lefstein et al., 2020). RPPs are strongly associated with the expectation that learning takes place on both sides - researchers and educators. This study is especially interested in identifying generative discourse sequences during RPP meetings.

The main topic of this paper is building knowledge within the RPP setting: How can discourse within RPP meetings be described, and what are the generative discourse sequences? How do they arise?