Influence of School Culture and Organizational Culture on Conflicts: Case of Serbian Primary Schools

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Journal: Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102)

Manuscript ID: education-3745553

Type: Article

Title: Influence of school culture and organizational culture on conflicts: case of Serbian primary schools

Thank you for this article.

This is an interesting and informative paper that focuses on the under-researched but significant topic of the Influence of school culture and organizational culture on conflicts. I have provided my thoughts on the article's strengths and suggestions on how it could be made more readable.

The two questions posed at the beginning of the study, as well as the two hypotheses, provide the relevant context. They are appropriate in the area of educational leadership for mitigating conflict. Furthermore, these questions are answered throughout the paper,and within the conclusions and findings of the research.

 The research design is thorough and robust. The findings are in line with much of the existing research but offer new insights, particularly in relation to the impact of Gender. The article provides some useful insights for both school leaders and for other academics. Conflict within schools, especially primary schools, is an interesting field, and it would be helpful to have some background on the reason for this research. Is there a noticeable uptick in conflict within schools in Serbia? Did this topic emerge from other research within primary schools in Serbia?  Further background and context would benefit the early chapters of the paper.

The literature review is comprehensive and generally covers key authors in the field. It is pleasing to note that the literature review utilises mainly very recent literature. This makes the research current and relevant in the modern context. It definitely helps to draw the reader’s attention to emerging trends.

The author has ensured quality control in terms of data gathering and explains the methodology very well. The quantitative approach is appropriate, but there is insufficient detail about the sampling process. How many teachers were invited to participate? Were those participating from state or independent schools? Were any of the participants in leadership roles? These were the questions that I asked out of interest.

The analysis of the questionnaire data is thorough and well explained. For those readers who are not necessarily familiar with quantitative analysis, it would be helpful to have included some examples of the questions under each of the item measures. Quantitative data are clearly presented in a logical manner.

The discussion is especially informative, and the links to the existing literature are clearly made. In chapters 5.1 and 5.2, it would be better to restate the hypotheses. In chapters 5.3 and 5.4, instead of writing RQ 1 and RQ 2, readability would be enhanced if the research questions in full were repeated. That way, readers do not have to go back to the start of the article to find, or remind themselves of the hypotheseis and the research questions.

The two main effects of Teacher Professionalism and Humane Orientation need further explanation. Teacher Professionalism is briefly explained early on in the article, but a definition of this could be in the results and discussion chapters. Humane Orientation is not really defined. There is a brief explanation of it in line 472, but for much of the paper, I was unsure of what Humane Orientation actually entailed. Some of the item terms used could be explained a little further.

The implications for, and relevance to, principal leadership practice need further expansion and emphasis. This would strengthen the significance of the study. There are no implications postured for leadership development or system policy.

The writing is generally clear and the use of English sound. Minor issues such as beginning paragraphs and sentences with

• Also
• As mentioned
• As above

could be addressed to enhance readability.

Some points to note.

Lines 95 and 96 – is this the contemporary legislation? Does it have a date?

Line 151 – the pronoun him is not acceptable as a universal pronoun for all students.

Lines 161 to 163 – this is not referenced correctly. Page numbers needed for direct quotations.

Line 272 – I suggest changing the phrase leadership styles to leadership practices.

Line 281 change school managers to school leaders.

Lines 289 to 290 – change leadership style to leadership approach.

Lines 297 to 300 – is there a more contemporary reference? Much has changed in schools over the past 50 years and I am not sure that teachers say the same thing about their jobs now.

Lines for 319 to 320 – is there more contemporary literature 1988 – even 2011 is getting a bit dated.

Line 320–3 authors are mentioned so the phrase should read should be their research.

Line 332 – this is odd phrasing.  Writing “considering everything”-  maybe reiterate what was taken into consideration.

Line 391 – omit the phrase a certain number of questionnaires – begin the sentence instead with 17 responses were discarded.

Line 693– the results are consistent with the results of previous research but the specific effects that existing studies have not identified needs to be restated.

 

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I must commend the effort of the author(s) for venturing into such a study, but issues raised should be resolved before the work is finally published. They are:

(1) For the title, note that the first alphabet immediately after the colon should begin with a capital letter instead of a small letter.

(2) For the abstract, I discovered that some relevant information is missing. For instance, the sample or the number of the participants, whether they are pupils or teachers, their age range, the percentage of gender for the participants, the mean and the standard deviation, the design of the study, the sampling technique employed, the instruments for data collection, the number of the hypotheses tested, and the statistical package for analyzing the data collected were not stated. These information are important for ease of understanding.

(3) For the abstract again, I observed from the results/findings stated, some of them were significant; some it is expected that the beta values and the p values for those that were significant should be indicated in bracket immediately after stating the results/findings.

(4) On page 94 to 100, I observed that some citations in brackets were done in Frech/ authors' local language; so I suggest that it should be written in English language just like all other parts.

(5) For the sub-caption: 'Theory and hypothesis', I suggest it should be written 'Theory and hypotheses' because is not only one hypothesis that was tested.

(6) The sub-captions for the revies should be improved with more information on similar empirical works.

(7) The hypotheses should be done separately and if done in such way, I believe more than two hypotheses will be stated. For e.g, apart from the two independent variables with different dimensions, before measuring the modereating effects of teachers' gender and organizational commitment, they should first of all find their predictive roles before talking about their moderating effects, and this is likely to increase the number of the hypotheses to be tested. So, I suggest that such aspect should be revisited.

(8) On PG 357 (Method) with the sub-caption 'Measure'-The author(s) should clearly inform their readers about the psychometric properties of each of the measures used in data collection, including whether it was adapted or adopted, and also whether any validation process took place by the present author(s).

(9) I suggest that the subcaption'participants and data collection' comes as the first sub-caption under method.

(10) I suggest that the sub-caption' 3:2 (participants and data collection) should be replaced with 'Procedure'.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript lacks formal expressions and academic tone so it needs to be rephrased in those instances (e.g., 'conflicts are a natural thing', line 31; 'the law that deals with...', line 95). The introduction part lacks scientific argumentation, well-organised sentences, more recent and versatile referenceing (e.g., overreliance on Göksoy & Argon, 2016) and referencing does not follow a specific guidance. References seem to be oriented to less known authors, majority of them comming from Middle East, Turkey, then we have Chile and Grece-not sure how they all relate to Serbian context? The manuscript should have been proofread before it was submitted (e.g., line 75, line 128, lines 163-165: is it 12 or twelve?; line 209-210). Theory and hypothesis part- it is difficult to follow the stream of thought as the 'ideas' and sentences seemed to be just randomly put together to make the chapter body sufficiently big. The references seem to be outdated and very sellective, if they are listed at all (e.g., line 297- where are the references for that statement?). Instruments used are quite out of date- is there a reason that more modern ones were not used? Has nothing changed in the school culture in the past 30 years that might have influenced the validity of those instruments? The Participants and data collection procedure needs to be better explained, much information is missing. The Result section could use a sentence or two in each paragraph explaining just in a nutshell what all the Tables show-not detailed as in the discussion part, but just a brief explanation (e.g., the results, therefore, show that those who showed higher XX also showed higher YY'). Abbreviations should be mentioned earlier in the manuscript because one cannot read the Tables otherwise. The discussion section lacks correlations with other Western Balkans and East-European context.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript should be proofread by a native speaker. I do not notice any major improvements to the quality of the article-it is still overly lengthy, the literature used is the same, sentences added to the abstract are too simple and don't reveal anything relevant.

 The limitations of this study have not been thoroughly addressed as well.

 The manuscript would not be interesting to many researchers as it is related to only to Serbia.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Manuscript should be proofread by a native speaker.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf