New Horizons in Education

Abstract

This study investigated Participatory Decision-Making (PDM) in Hong Kong self-managing secondary schools. It also examined teachers’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, role ambiguity and role conflict in relation to PDM. A questionnaire survey involving 959 teachers from 214 schools was conducted. Principal components analysis was used to study the underlying subscales of teachers’ PDM and their affective work outcomes. Correlational analysis, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multiple regression analysis were employed to examine the relationships between teachers’ PDM and their affective work outcomes.

Two decision domains (managerial and teaching) emerged in Hong Kong secondary schools. Teachers were generally more involved in PDM in the teaching domain than the managerial domain. Teachers from School Management Initiative (SMI) schools had greater participation in managerial decisions than non-SMI schools, but there was no significant difference in PDM between SMI and non-SMI teachers in decisions related to teaching.

Non-SMI teachers were more decisionally deprived in both the managerial and teaching domains than were SMI teachers. However, both SMI and non-SMI teachers were more decisionally deprived in the managerial domain than the teaching domain. For both managerial and teaching domains, principals’ support for PDM was a significant positive predictor for teachers’ actual participation.

Six subscales of job satisfaction emerged from the analysis: work itself, supervision, colleagues, indirect participation in PDM, workload and responsibility. There were two subscales for organizational commitment which include present and future commitment.

No significant difference between SMI and non-SMI teachers emerged for any job satisfaction subscales except responsibility. SMI teachers were less satisfied with their sense of responsibility for teaching than non-SMI teachers. SMI teachers may have diverted some of their time and energy from teaching to PDM in managerial issues, lessening their satisfaction in the area of teaching responsibilities. Results also indicated that there were no significant differences in either present or future commitment, role ambiguity and role conflict between SMI and non-SMI teachers.

Principals’ support for PDM was a significant, positive predictor for both present and future commitment, lower level of teachers’ role ambiguity and role conflict, and most of the subscales of teacher job satisfaction.

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