SCHOOL ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE IN EUROPEAN SCHOOLS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF FUTURE SCHOOL LEADERS

The educational management theory still needs good concepts to describe and understand the specificity of schools as organizations. The concept of organizational culture is probably one of the best examples of ideas that can be transferred from the area of the general management theory to the domain of educational management in order to help to solve this problem. Looking at schools from the perspective of organizational culture helps to describe them, understand them better as organizations and eventually makes school transformation easier.
One of the problems with school organizational culture is that they are different. Good description of those differences helps to apply practical action when school reform and transformation is needed. International comparisons of school culture can help to understand the richness of school organizational culture and its development in different national contexts that then can help in educational transformations that are undertaken locally.
The paper presents the research on school organizational culture carried out with the participation of a group of students from six European countries taking part in an international training project focused on school leadership development. Universities from Spain, England, Norway, Ireland, Poland and Turkey were among the partners taking part in that project. The research group consisted of students of different master degree and postgraduate programmes of educational management or leadership. They were asked to assess school organizational culture in their countries and their own preferred organizational culture using the Charles Handy typology of organizational cultures. The paper presents the results of that study that show some interesting differences between students opinion about organizational cultures in the six countries.