In the 21^st century the investment in human capital is required as a key factor of development in modern societies, which focus mainly on schooling for this purpose. Although the educational community plays a catalytic role in this approach, teachers often experience job burnout or come forward to organizational silence (Skaalvil & Skaalvik, 2017). In order to limit these situations, some scholars argue that an administration style of school leadership with democratic characteristics could create a school climate which encourages teachers to express their ideas and goals and result a more effective function of the school organization (Schlosser & Zolin, 2012).

Job burnout refers to those characteristics that describe emotional exhaustion in order to cope with the demands of the working environment and might affect teachers’ physical and psychological health condition (Hakanen & Bakker, 2017· Burkre, Greenglass & Schwarzer, 1996). Moreover, organizational silence refers to the voluntary attitude of the members of an organization to silent significant issues that are related to the normal function of that organization (Morrison & Milken, 2000). Both job burnout and organizational silence are two important dimensions that could react on the normal functioning of the school organization. The study of Knoll, Mayer, Kroemer and Schroeder – Abe (2015) reports that any dimension of the organizational silence, whether it is acquiescent, prosocial, opportunistic or quiescent silence, have significant effect on any job burnout dimension such as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization or personal accomplishment and vice versa. In educational community, the school leader often needs to co-operate with teachers in order to solve school issues that may arise. In this case, the existing of organizational silence in the teaching staff body could cause multiple problems in schools’ function (Crocket, 2013). Nevertheless, some scholars usually refer to the lack of leadership support among other factors that manifest teachers burnout (Skaalvil & Skaalvik, 2017), as teachers may feel that their Head Teacher does not support them or does not provide them with the resources that they need in order to manage their responsibilities successfully, leading them to job burnout (Langher, Caputo & Ricci, 2017).

In view of the above, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between job burnout and organizational silence with leadership styles in the Greek schooling. The study of these phenomena is necessary in order to understand how they affect schools’ effective function therefore to design those strategies that will guide to the most suitable style of leadership in educational organizations. Furthermore, a deeper understanding would provide answers for a better performance of leadership styles in order to motivate teachers to express themselves regarding the problems of the school organizations that they serve. Therefore, a beneficial cooperation will be developed between teachers and Head Teachers that will induce teachers to be more efficient and as a result school leadership would be able to adopt its style when it is essential.

The study aimed to examine the degree of impact of Head Teachers leadership style to the manifestation of the phenomena of job burnout and organizational silence in the Greek public schools. Specifically, we examined differences between teachers serving in general and special education under the influence of the way in which the Head Teacher wield his leadership. International scientific literature in the field of educational research does not present a sufficient number of publications to understand this relationship in terms of differences that occur between general and special education. Our research followed a quantitative research method. The research tool that we used to collect our data combined the Maslach Burnout Scale (Maslach & Jackson, 1986), the Organizational Silence Scale of Knoll & VanDick (2013) and twenty questions aiming to investigate the way that the Head Teacher wields his leadership – Head Teacher Skills Questionnaire, which derived from School Leadership Questionnaire (Brauckmann & Pashiardis, 2009). The tool was adapted to the needs of our study and included nine demographic questions also. The sample was one hundred twenty three Greek teachers working in both general and special education schools. We used 2x2 analysis of variance tests to investigate differences between groups and Pearson r correlation coefficient to examine statistical significant relationship among all depended variables. The level of significance was set at p< .05.

The results showed that teachers of our sample have low level of emotional exhaustion and that they mostly use prosocial silence. The 2Χ2 ANOVA tests between groups neither for burnout nor for the organizational silence touch the level of statistical significance. Statistical significant differences between groups were found for the Head Teacher Skills Questionnaire dimensions. Specifically, special education teachers seemed to consider that their Head Teachers’ skills affect in a higher degree than what the general teachers consider for their Head Teachers’ skills. According to the teachers opinion the “communication skills” seemed to be the most important dimension for the effectiveness of the Head Teacher Skills. Moreover, statistical significant low correlations were found between the dimensions of burnout and the dimensions of organizational silence. Additionally, significant low correlation was found between all dimensions of burnout and the dimension “participation in management of the Head Teacher Skills Questionnaire. Finally, significant moderate correlations were found between dimension “participation in management” of the Head Teacher Skills Questionnaire and the acquiescent silence. Our research data confirmed that effective leaders have an impact on management of teachers’ burnout and can influence the development of organizational silence in educational organizations (Akin & Ulusoy, 2016). Teachers in special education use individual teaching practices due to the heterogenic profile of a special education class (Cochran-Smith & Dudley-Marling, 2012). Thus, Head Teachers confront difficulties that should be managed immediately in order to lead their staff effectively and prevent them from burnout or organizational silence that could be developed when teaching under those demanding circumstances (Schlosser & Zolin, 2012; Evers, Tomic & Brouwers, 2005). On the other hand leadership in general education operates under hierarchical terms of cooperation (Bush & Glover, 2014). This could explain the significant differences between groups in our sample regarding Head Teachers leading skills.

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