Investigating the Role of Organizational Flexibility and Organizational Literacy in the Performance of School Managers

Although the role of educational leadership in promoting school and society has been well-documented, the complexity of such leadership in the 21st century presents challenges that are more daunting than ever before. Today’s school leaders must be capable of preparing thoughtful, productive, literate citizens who contribute individually and collectively to the future well-being of all and who are positioned to succeed in a global environment. So successful managers should try to improve the organization's performance. Perhaps the first concept that has been taken into account since the inception of organizations is the concept of organization's performance. Because all organizations are created to achieve the goals, the goal is realized in a process that can be called the performance of the organization.The performance of organizations is a function of manpower, facilities, equipment, policies, and so on. But today, due to environmental changes and new technologies, it has been determined that other factors also affect the performance of the organization. These include organizational flexibility and information literacy of the organization's executives. In fact, organizational flexibility and organizational literacy can play a significant role in improving performance. Information literacy involves knowing when and why information is needed, where to find it, and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner. Information literate person is one who can understand the need for information, the resources available, how to find information, the need to evaluate results, how to work with or exploit results, ethics and responsibility of use, how to communicate or share one’s findings, and how to manage the findings. Flexibility denotes the organizational capacity to respond to a turbulent environment through innovation development of products, services and processes, based on a culture of learning and renewal. In the sense of managing human resources, flexibility can be defined as the organization adapting to size, composition, responsiveness and the people. Therefore, considering the role of organizational flexibility and organizational literacy, the purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between these two variables with organizational performance. So, the purpose of this study was to explain the relationship between organizational flexibility and organizational literacy with performance status of school administrators in Gilan-e-Gharb. The research methodology was descriptive-correlation type, and the statistical population of this research was all school administrators and assistants in Gilan-e-Gharb (2017-2018). According to the study, there were 135 directors and assistants in all three courses (50 primary school, 31 middle school and 54 secondary school) and both Gender (61 women and 74 men) was from public and private schools. Finally, 100 people were selected as a statistical sample by stratified random sampling of three educational courses. The research instrument consisted of Gardner's flexible standard questionnaire (1999), Hersey's and Goldsmith's organizational performance questionnaire (2003), and researcher-made information literacy questionnaire. The reliability of each of them was calculated with Cronbach's alpha, which was 0.88, 0.93 and 0.90, respectively Desirable has been reported. The data obtained from these questionnaires were analyzed using the structural equation model using PLS software. Structural Equation Model was used to study the research model. The whole process of analyzing the data of this research is dominant in Statistical Package Of Social Sciences software and Partial least squares regression software were performed using PLS2 software. The results showed that the three components of information literacy, namely, the need for information, the gathering of information and the use of information, have a positive and significant impact on organizational performance. In other words, the sense of the need for information, the collection of information and the use of information will increase, and the level of performance of managers will increase. But it is worth noting that among the four components of information literacy, only the evaluation and analysis of information did not have a significant effect on the performance of managers. In general, we can say that information literacy plays a significant role in improving the performance of school principals. These results coincided with the researches by Elmamoz et al.  (2011), Niazazari et al. (2015), Shariatmadari and Bakhtiari (2014), Feng and Ha (2016). The results also showed that organizational flexibility has a positive and significant effect on organizational performance. In other words, as much as organizational flexibility increases, managers' performance increases. So, the results showed that the exogenous variables such as organizational flexibility and organizational literacy can predict changes in the managers’ performance. Therefore, according to the results of this study, it is suggested that policymakers and educational planners organize workshops to strengthen the information literacy and flexibility of school principals. And these workshops will be held according to the needs of managers, and also be used by experienced professors in these courses. It is also suggested that school managers improve their flexibility to improve their performance. And in order to increase the flexibility of the organization, managers must provide flexible processes and structures. They must adapt themselves to the needs of students, teachers, parents, and technological and economic changes. Finally, managers must improve their informational literacy skills to improve their performance. In this context, managers should have in-service training on information-seeking skills and the proper use of information. The most important limitation of this research, which is a characteristic of the social sciences, is the effect of variables whose control is beyond the reach of the researcher. Another limitation of this research is the use of self-reported questionnaires to evaluate variables. Limited access to managers due to the high level of engagement and the skepticism of managers to research and lack of a correct understanding of managerial concepts is another limitation.