Uncovering teachers’ organizational cynicism: a study with qualitative method

The ministry of education is one of the biggest, most important and complicated social entities and the quality of the performance of other entities largely depend on its performance. There is no doubt that the ministry of education helps to improve and enrich the cultural, social and economic development in all societies (Hua and Herstein,2003). However, perfection of humans lies in their proper training and the ministry of education is the means to reach the ultimate human dignity. Hence, education and training have always been the greatest and the most difficult problem humans face with. Each organization has e technical core that is linked to the main mission of the organization. In the ministry of education, teaching-learning is considered the technical core and other activities are considered peripheral with regard to it (Hoy and Myskl,1395).Therefore, all the countries annually dedicate great human and financial resources to achieve this important issue. However, it can be certainly claimed that from among all the resources, the role of teachers is of huge significance because their performance in teaching-learning process has positive direct effects on the quality of the teaching and students’ academic achievement (Lockheed and Respoor,1371). Regardless of his/her role in this process, each teacher acts upon a set of values and beliefs. The beliefs might be clear and directly affect the teacher’s behavior or they might not be clear and affect the teacher’s behavior unknowingly (Nolan and Hoover,1388). Either way, teachers as the people who shoulder the important responsibility of teaching are influenced by various factors and their viewpoints and philosephy immensely influence their performance.( Vakilian,1387) Teachers’ cynicism is not an exception and can have abundant effects on their performance. Cynicism is the attitude formed of hopelessness, frustration and failure and is related to humiliation, hatred and distrust. This negative attitude has penetrated in many organizations, and it is the cause of many undesirable and negative organizational consequences and one of the problematic issues at workplace (James,2005) Coal et al. (2006) defined organizational cynicism as a value judgment derived from the job experiences of the individuals (Brown and Cregan,2008).Anderson defines organizational cynicism as a general and specific attitude that is formed by despair and hopelessness, alienation, negative feeling and distrust to the organization (Andersson,1996).Organizational cynicism is defined as the negative attitude towards the organization and consists of three dimensions:

The belief that the organization is not truthful,
Negative feeling to the organization, and
The tendency to show humiliating and malicious behaviors to the organization, which are negative according to these beliefs and feelings (Dean et al.1998) .

Therefore, organizational cynicism is a multi-dimensional concept the strength and severity of cynical attitude is a function of the strength and severity of each of the dimensions. Furthermore, studies have shown that the three dimensions are mutually connected to the cynical attitude (Levent and Keser, 2016).
Organizational cynicism leads to undesirable consequences. In a study on organizational cynicism, Chaburu et al. (2013) showed that cynicism has important and long-term negative effects on the capabilities of individuals and the organization such as lack of commitment and not performing duties (Bellini et al., 2015).
In addition, Abraham (2000) found in his study that organizational cynicism has negative effects on job satisfaction and organizational commitment and leads to alienation (with the organization) (Davis,2002).
In total, the series of studies on cynicism consequences in organizations have shown that there is a negative relationship between organizational cynicism and organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior, job satisfaction and job performance (Brown and Cregan,2008). Hence, cynicism is the issue that should be investigated seriously.Numerous studies have been conducted so far throughout the world on cynicism in different organizations. Unfortunately, organizational cynicism among teachers has been neglected and no comprehensive studies have been carried out to identify its components. However, it should be noted that despite the similarity between organizations, academic institutions have unique features that distinguishes them from other organizations and this calls for the necessity of identifying cynicism, in particular. Accordingly, the main purpose of the present study is to identify the components of organizational cynicism among the elementary school teachers in Tehran. It was a qualitative study conducted using phenomenography method. Research data was collected through in-depth ad semi-structured interviews with the interviewees. Research samples were selected purposefully.
Considering the research subject, the most important criterion for selecting participants in the first place was having 5 years of teaching experience in elementary schools in Tehran. However, for the enrichment of the data, it was decided to use the participants who apart from the aforementioned criterion have a background of being the school principal, being a member of educational groups in the region and in-service teacher. Accordingly, 6 informants had at least one of the aforementioned features apart from the main criterion. Therefore, the sampling method in this study is purposive with the maximum variation sampling. At the beginning of the interviews, after explaining the research purpose and gaining the interviewee’s trust, a general question was asked about the things that elementary school teachers had a negative attitude towards and which of the attitudes is derived from their distrust.  Afterwards, other questions were put forward: why do the distrusts form? Which feelings are cynical teachers engaged in and which behaviors do they take up? Besides, inquiring questions were also asked when necessary to overcome the ambiguities and understand the phenomenon deeper. At the end of each interview, the interview content was examined carefully and printed on paper for content analysis. Coding method at three levels of open coding, axial coding and selective coding was used to analyze each interview.
Data saturation was achieved completely and confidently after interviewing with 14 interviewees. Member control technique was used to ensure the reliability of the data. In addition, to increase the transferability, attempts were made to provide a comprehensive description of the collected data set.
According to the findings, the fundamental issues of organizational cynicism in teachers included 1) cynicism towards colleagues, 2) cynicism towards parents, 3) cynicism towards students, 4) cynicism towards educational issues, 5) cynicism towards plans and programs, and 6) cynicism towards professional development.