The Role of Self-Efficacy and Organizational Culture on School Employees' Perceived Ability to Meet Students' Educational Needs

Background and Purpose: Public schools face must meet increasing performance standards without significant changes in support, requiring employees to develop innovative solutions to overcome barriers to student learning. Organizational learning represents a management approach valuing flexibility and openness to thinking about goals, such as student achievement. Schools functioning as learning organizations collaboratively and flexibly plan, implement, and evaluate creative strategies to achieve performance goals. Professionals who believe in their own capabilities tend to be willing to try new strategies and innovations. The present study explores the extent to which schools’ organizational environment and staff’s sense of their capabilities are associated with their school’s ability to meet students’ educational needs.  

Methods: The School Success Profile-Learning Organization (SSP-LO) was administered to 3,065 employees at 68 schools from 2005-2009.  The SSP-LO is a 36-item learning organization measure using a six-point response scale to assess two domains of organizational learning—actions and sentiments.  The actions and sentiments scales each have a one-factor structure with high internal consistency (α =.96 and α =.97, respectively). Structural equation modeling (SEM) permitted exploration of hypothesized direct association of actions, sentiments, and individual self-efficacy beliefs on ratings of the school’s ability to educate students. Because SSP-LO variables have ordinal response options, the Weighted Least Squares with means and variances adjustments (WLSMV) was used as the default estimator. We also ran parallel models by comparing models that account for clustering in schools to those that do not.

Results: Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used to confirm the measurement component of the model as a first order two correlated-factor model :(χ² =5815.887, df =502, p < .001, RMSEA =.059., 90% CI [.058, .061], CFI =.951, TLI=.946). The structural component of our model also fit the data well (χ² =4621.377, df =593, p < .001, RMSEA =.047, 90%, CFI =.963, TLI=.959). Non-significant beta coefficients for regressed variables in the between component suggested there did not appear to be a school effect. Moreover, nearly all the SSP-LO items had Intra-class Correlations (ICCs) below .15. Thus, the cluster variable was removed to simplify the model. The final model had good fit (χ² = 3508.095, df = 347, p < .001, RMSEA = .055, 90% CI [.053, .057], CFI = .982, TLI=.981), with all paths among substantive variables showing statistical significance. School organizational culture and individual capabilities are statistically significantly related to perceived school performance. School organizational culture was also associated with staff’s beliefs about their own ability to meet the educational needs of their students.

Discussion and Implications: Psychosocial and organizational features of schools have long been of interest to interventionists hoping to promote educational success of students. Teacher’s own perceptions of their capabilities and their school’s culture are important for student learning. Findings from the present study suggest that relationships among school employees may affect how staff view their own capabilities as well as their school’s ability to promote student learning. Interventions that promote relationships among school staff may thus improve the work environment and psychosocial characteristics of school staff, and ultimately, student performance.