Psychology has traditionally focused on psychological deficits and disability until recently (Carr, 2004). Therefore, psychology has been criticized as primarily dedicated to addressing mental illness rather than mental ‘‘wellness.’’ (Bakker, Schaufeli, Leiter, & Taris, 2008). However, nowadays positive psychology perspective attracted most of the scholars’ attention such that researchers from different disciplines try to focus and make research on employees' positive emotions and behaviors rather than negative ones. This new branch of psychology is primarily concerned with the scientific study of human strengths and happiness (Carr, 2004; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). According this school of view, we must bring the building of strength to the forefront in the treatment and prevention of mental illness (Seligman, 2002) not the deficits and illness. Viewed from this “positive” perspective, it is not surprising that burnout research seems to shift towards its opposite: work engagement.

Maslach and Leiter (1997) assumes that engagement and burnout constitute the opposite poles of a continuum of work related well-being. According to their point of view while burnout represents the negative pole, engagement represent the positive. Contrary to those who suffer from burnout, engaged employees have a sense of energetic and effective connection with their work, and instead of stressful and demanding they look upon their work as challenging (Bakker, Schaufeli, Leiter, & Taris, 2008). Work engagement can be defined as “a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption” (Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma & Bakker, 2002, p. 74).  In an ever-changing world, schools, like other organizations, must be cooperative, cohesive, and well-managed ever than before in order to be responsive, effective, and productive (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2000). For schools to be effective

 The purpose of the study

The purpose of this research is to examine the psychometric properties of long (UWES-17) and short forms (UWES-9) of Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) (Schaufeli, Bakker, & Salanova, 2006; Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma, & Bakker, 2002) for the Turkish school principals.  Although long and short forms of UWES scale adopted in Turkish by Eryılmaz & Doğa (2012), factor structure of it was not tested for school principals.

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