Educational Leadership Research

Abstract Contemporary organizations increasingly face the widespread issue of workplace loneliness, which undermines individual performance and personal satisfaction. New teachers, in particular, are vulnerable to emotional deprivation, a lack of constructive relationships, psychological burnout, depression, and anxiety within school environments. Given that organizational loneliness remains a relatively new and underexplored concept in Iran-especially in the context of education-this study aims to identify, examine, and analyze the lived experiences of novice elementary school teachers with respect to organizational loneliness. The research specifically focuses on contributing factors, consequences, and individual and collective coping strategies. Adopting a qualitative phenomenological approach, the study involved 12 new teachers in Ilam, selected through purposive sampling. Data were gathered through in-depth semi-structured interviews, continuing until theoretical saturation was achieved. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics for demographic profiling and thematic analysis via MAXQDA20 software. To ensure validity, member checking was employed, and inter-coder agreement was used to verify coding reliability. The findings categorized the contributing factors into four dimensions: individual, socio-cultural, psychological, and occupational-encompassing 36 subthemes. The consequences of organizational loneliness were similarly grouped into four domains: personal, interpersonal, psychological, and professional, comprising 37 subthemes. In terms of solutions, 24 individual strategies (including communicative and professional aspects) and 21 collective strategies (psychological, group-based, occupational, and interpersonal) were identified. The study concludes that organizational loneliness has significant negative implications for both individuals and institutions. As loneliness continues to rise globally, recognizing its causes and consequences within organizational settings is of critical importance. Understanding novice teachers' experiences in this regard can provide educational administrators with valuable insights to foster greater job satisfaction, organizational commitment, creative engagement, social interaction, teamwork, and a stronger sense of belonging among teachers-particularly by addressing the critical role of organizational support.
The findings revealed four categories of factors contributing to organizational loneliness: individual, socio-cultural, psychological, and occupational, encompassing 36 concepts. Additionally, 37 consequences were identified, including personal, communicative, psychological, and job-related effects. The study also proposed 24 individual and 21 group strategies for addressing loneliness. The results indicate that organizational loneliness has detrimental effects on both individuals and organizations, highlighting the importance of understanding its causes and consequences. Investigating this issue can help improve new teachers' attitudes, job attachment, social interactions, teamwork, and overall job satisfaction, particularly by addressing the lack of organizational support that contributes to their feelings of loneliness.

Abstract The purpose of this research was to identify the micro and macro occasions of the Iranian higher education system in the field of liberal arts. The mixed research method was exploratory which in the qualitative stage was from the content analysis method and in the quantitative stage was from the structural equations. The statistical population consisted of experts on the transformation of the Iranian higher education system that using targeted sampling and snowball, 214 elites in the field of higher education of Kermanshah universities were selected as the sample size by stratified sampling. The research tool was a semi-structured interview and a researcher-made questionnaire. Content was used to assess the validity and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used for the reliability of the questionnaire. The statistical method in the quantitative stage was the modeling of structural equations. Findings showed that the macro occasions of transformation include capital, development, cultural, environmental and motivational factors, and the micro occasions of transformation include: freedom of thought, information updating, skilled knowledge force, knowledge marketing, knowledge commercialization, knowledge transfer, knowledge development, strong cultural knowledge building, knowledge value creation, strengthening knowledge culturalization, research-oriented, scientific competition, knowledge conceptualization, scientific encouragement, quality of knowledge services and knowledge support.