Effects of Administrative Climate and Interpersonal Climate in University on Teachers’ Mental Health

A self-made questionnaire was used to test the influence of university administrative and interpersonal climate to teachers’ mental health. 826 teachers were stratified randomly from 20 universities across China, and the survey data of samples were analyzed by correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis. The results show that the administrative and interpersonal climate in universities is one significantly positive predicting variable of the teachers’ mental health. The study finds out that administrators and educational practitioners should strengthen the construction of soft power in universities, such as promoting the culture and positive organizational climate, building up good administrative and interpersonal climate, so as to promote teachers’ mental health development.


Introduction
Every university has its unique culture and climate, such as the taste of the campus, the arrangement of the classrooms, the conditions of the libraries and laboratories, the running and walking in the playgrounds, students' clothes, styles of walking, tones of talking, people's attitudes of meeting each other, and even the features of the presidents (Zhu, 1982).These unique characteristics of each university are referred to as the organizational climate of a university.In fact, the climate of organization may be roughly conceived as the "personality" of the organization, that is, climate is to an organization as personality is to an individual (Halpin & Croft, 1963).A university's organizational climate is a set of lasting internal psychological features which can distinguish one university from another (Robert, 1975;Hoy, Hannum, & Tstchannen-Moran, 1998;Pan & Qin, 2007a).
There are many researches about school organizational climate at home and abroad.Their researches are mainly focused on the following aspects.(1) Some are describing and measuring the degrees of school organizational climate, such as OCDQ1 (Halpin & Croft, 1963), OCDQ-RE and OCDQ-RM (Hoy et al., 1991(Hoy et al., , 1996)), OCI (Stern, 1963), POS (Likert & Bowers, 1968), and so on; (2) Some are studying the relationship between school organizational climate and the organizational effectiveness, such as school effectiveness (Hoy et al., 1990;Gelade & Gilbert, 2003;Griffith, 2006;Van Houtte, 2005), organizational health (Cullen et al., 1999) and student achievement (Hoy & Hannum, 1997;Dumay, 2009;Yin & Ma, 2009), teachers' job satisfaction (Nalcaci, 2012;Pan & Qin, 2007a), job burnout (Tian & Li, 2006) and teacher commitment (Riehl & Sipple, 1996;Zhu et al., 2011); (3) Some others are trying to predict and manipulate school organizational climate, for example, school climate in predicting school effectiveness (Hoy et al., 1990), school health (Cullen et al., 1999), school disorder (Gottfredson, 2005), teachers' job satisfaction, mental health (Deng, Pan & He, 2006;Pan & Qin, 2007b;Ou, Pan, & Huang, 2008) and student achievement (Hoy & Hannum, 1997;Dumay, 2009;Yin & Ma, 2009).In China, some scholars in the past discussed the school organizational climate, for example, Zhu (1982) tried to analyze it early in 1940s.He believes that school organizational climate is spirit of school, and he thinks that there are 5 meanings in "spirit" of the term "school spirit".Pan (2007) believes organizational climate in universities is a set of lasting internal psychological features which can distinguish one university from another, and they found that school organizational climate had 4 dimensions, i.e.: administrative climate, teaching climate, studying climate and interpersonal climate.At same time, Pan found that school administrative climate and interpersonal climate had a distinct positive correlation with mental health of teachers in secondary schools (Pan & Qin, 2007b;Ou, Pan, & Huang, 2008).However, whether the mental health of teachers is affected by organizational climate in universities?The answer is still uncertain, therefore, it is very worth to study the relationship between the mental health of teachers and the organizational climate in universities.
A university is a unique place to cultivate people.How good a school organizational climate is will influence the mental health of its members directly or indirectly, just as Owens et al. (1987) states that teachers will appear more smart and confident in a school of nice environment than those in a school of tense relationship.This assumption is based on the following theories: (1) Dialectical Materialism (Gollobin, 1986).This theory thinks that a person's subjective world originates from the objective world.One transforms himself while he is trying to change the objective world.This relationship about the subject and object provides the basis for the current study.(2) The theory of "cognitive map" put forward by Tolman.According to Tolman and Lewin (Tang & Chen, 2001), a person only exists when he interacts with the environment.People will form a certain "cognitive map" or "conscious sense" of the environment when they are interacting with it.And this environment mainly consists of social relationship, organizations and natural settings related to one's experiences.And this "conscious sense" further governs a person's behavior and acts upon the environment and mental activities.(3) The "field theory" proposed by Lewin (1951).Lewin thinks that man's behavior is only the function of its living space, and the living space is made of "all possible elements, including people (P) and environment (E)".A formula can be used to show its meaning: B = f (P.E) (B: behavior; P: people; E: environment and f: function).In the process of people's interaction with the environment, there will surely be an interactive "field".And this "field" will react to man's mind and behavior.Therefore, man's mind and behavior will be restricted by this "field".Accordingly, in a school, a special place to educate the youth, as the most direct environment acting upon the teachers, school organizational climate is certain to play a very important role in teachers' physical and psychological development.Based on above analysis, a hypothesis can be proposed: Hypothesis 1: There is a positive relationship between university administrative climate (UAC) and teachers' mental health (TMH), UAC is a significant positive predictor of TMH.
Hypothesis 2: There is a positive relationship between university interpersonal climate (UIC) and teachers' mental health (TMH), UIC is a significant positive predictor of TMH.
Hypothesis 3: UIC exerts obvious mediating effects between UAC and TMH.

Participants
This study applies the method of survey to find out the relationship among university administrative organizational climate, interpersonal climate and teachers' mental health in university in China.The questionnaire is in Chinese so as to ease and the process of answering and to better the result.By using stratified random sampling, 4 universities were chosen from each of the five districts: east, west, south, north and the central districts in China.There are 20 universities were finally chosen.Fifty teachers in each university were chosen by random to answer the questionnaire.Among the delivered 1000 questionnaires, there are 826 valid ones.open in the process of doing their duties), and administrative efficiency (AE: Do managers possess good qualities and skills to manage?What is the efficiency of managing?).Interpersonal climate includes interpersonal action (IAc: This refers to the relationship between persons.It shows itself as whether they are united and help each other in their work), interpersonal harmony (IH: is a feeling of the environment, such as a harmonious and peaceful interpersonal relationship), interpersonal attitude (IAt: is a tendency of recognizing and attracting each other, such as friendly, kind and enthusiastic to each other), and interpersonal distance (ID: is what persons perceive about the remoteness and closeness of the interpersonal relationship) (Pan and Song, 2014).A five-point scale (1 = never, 5 = always) is applied in the scale.Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses show that the scale's structural validity is good (χ 2 /df = 2.06, CFI = 0.92, GFI = 0.94, RMSEA = 0.045).The internal consistency reliability is 0.89.According to Hoy et al. (1991)'s standardization method, the score was standardized using 500 as the average (the average of the score of each subscale in the school) and 100 as the deviation, resulting in a standardized score (SDS).The formula used for calculating the score for each subscale was: SDS = X (x -y)/SD + 500; where x is the score for each dimension, y is the average, and SD is the standard deviation.The organizational climate standard value is following: An administrative climate and interpersonal climate standard value smaller than 500 is undesirable, and the smaller it is, the less desirable.A standard value greater than 500 is good, and the higher it is, the better.

Self-Rated Health Measurement Scale (SRHMS)
One scale to evaluate teachers' mental health in a Self-rated Health Measurement Scale (Xu, 1999) is used in this study.This scale is composed of positive passion, negative passion and cognitive function three factors.It includes 15 items, and 10 scales from "very unhealthy" to "very health" are followed each item ("0" = very unhealthy; "10" = very health).The negative passion uses minus values.The larger the value is, the healthier it is.The content validity, the structural validity and criterion validity, and the reliability are proved to be good by Xu (1999).In this study, the internal consistency reliability is 0.86.

Procedure
The researchers are trained to collect the data.They choose the teachers in each university as a group to do the questionnaire.The teachers do the questionnaire all by themselves anonymously.All the measurements are processed with SPSSwin20.0,and are analyzed by ways of description, partial correlation and hierarchical regression.

Correlation Analysis of University Administrative Climate and Teachers' Mental Health
• Descriptive statistics and correlation analysis of the valid data gets a very good result, shown in Table 1.
• Table 1 demonstrates that there is a very significant positive correlation between the four factors of university administrative climate and teachers' mental health.This again proves that the better the university administrative climate is, the healthier the teachers' mental health is.Hypothesis 1 is validated.

Correlation Analysis of University Interpersonal Climate and Teachers' Mental Health
• Descriptive statistics and correlation analysis of the valid data gets a very good result, shown in Table 2.
• Table 2 demonstrates that there is a very significant positive correlation between the four factors of university interpersonal climate and teachers' mental health.It proves that the better the university interpersonal climate is, the healthier the teachers' mental health is.Hypothesis 2 is validated.

Hierarchical Regression Analysis of UAC, UIC and Teachers' Mental Health
• The significant positive correlation among UAC, UIC and teachers' mental health, which only shows an influence tendency.And this tendency may be the results of other variables.In order to solve this problem, the hierarchical regression analysis is applied to further confirm the close relationship among UAC, UIC and teachers' mental health.The first step is to put geographical information as gender, teaching years, educational background and ranks as independent variables.The second step is to put UAC as independent variables based on the geographical information.The third step is to put UIC as independent variables based on the geographical information and UAC.Then, the prediction of these factors to teachers' mental health is analyzed.The result is shown in Table 3. • The data in Table 3 shows that: 1) When the geographical information is used to analyze the influences to    teachers' mental health, only the gender is significant, but it is weak, only accounting for 0.6% of the variation; 2) the UAC factor has a significant prediction to teachers' mental health (β UAC = 0.371, p < 0.001) when the geographical information is controlled, and it accounts for 11.7% of the variation.It shows that the better the UAC is, the healthier the teachers' mental health is; 3) The UIC factor has a significant prediction to teachers' mental health (β UIC = 0.391, p < 0.001) when the geographical information and UAC are controlled, and it accounts for 9.8% of the variation.It shows that the better the UIC is, the healthier the teachers' mental health is; 4) In the third step, UIC is added to the regression model between UAC and teachers' mental health, the standardized regression coefficient of UAC and teachers' mental health is sharply reduced to 0.148 from 0.371, though t value is still at significant level; the standardized regression coefficient of UIC and teachers' mental health is 0.391, t = 5.39, p < 0.01.Hence, the third-step appraisal of mediating variable is well met, and UIC exerts partial mediating effect.Hypothesis 3 is partly proved.

Effects of Each Sub-Factors of UAC and UIC to Teachers' Mental Health
• If only the main effect of UCA and UIC to teachers' mental health is analyzed, the effects of the sub-factors of them may be simplified.Therefore, a multi regression analysis is carried out by putting the four sub-factors of UAC and four sub-factors of UIC as independent variables, teachers' mental health as a dependent variable.The results are shown in Table 4 to Table 5. • Table 4 shows that the management style has a very significant effect to teachers' mental health, and it accounts for 13.7% of the variation.Management style refers to managers' managing behaviors, such as whether it is democratic or autocratic, rigorous or flexible, open or closed.This means that different management styles are the key factors to influence teachers' mental health.• The data in Table 5 shows that interpersonal action and interpersonal harmony are the key factors to influence teachers' mental health, and they accounts for 19.5% of the variation.Interpersonal action refers to the relationship between persons.It shows itself as whether they are united and help each other in their work.
Interpersonal harmony is a feeling of the environment, such as a harmonious and peaceful interpersonal relationship.Interpersonal action and interpersonal harmony have a very significant effect to teachers' mental health.This shows that the better the interpersonal action and interpersonal harmony are, the healthier the teachers' psychological hearth is.

Discussion
In this study, we demonstrate that there is a positive correlation between UAC and TMH, and UAC plays a positive predictive role in TMH, consistent with relevant studies home and abroad.For example, Pan (2004) found there is a close relationship between administrative climate of school and SCL-90 results of teachers.In Pan's opinion, the core of administrative climate is the leadership of the president, the president's consideration and influence have a significant correlation and great influence to teachers' mental health (Pan & Cheng, 2001).Cheng and Tang (1997) find out that there is a very positive correlation between president's leadership and aspects of organizational climate.They think that good leadership may lead to good relationship among president, teacher and students, and a good interpersonal relationship will promote good leadership, which will greatly influence the healthy development of school organizational climate and teachers' psychology.On the other hand, with the development of bureaucratic administration and president's prime responsibility, power in most universities is gradually in charge of a few persons, they manage university autocratically.This style of managing is closely related to the future and development of a school, and this leadership will obviously influence teachers' behavior.The goals of the tasks, rules, working procedures, measures of awarding and punishing, welfare, fairness and just and so on will all have a great impact on teachers' psychological behavior.There are mainly three classic types of leadership: authoritarian, democratic and laissez-faire leadership (Kreitner, 1989).Different leadership will lead to different leading style and behaviors, which will form different organizational climate.Different organizational climate will influence members' psychological climate, for example, autocratic leadership controls power in one person, he exercises all the power himself without staff members' participation, lack of respect and trust of the staff members.In this case, a leader will never listen to the opinions of the staff members and he only thinks of the work, not the needs and feelings of the staff members.In a school of such a case, teachers are always treated unfairly and their social needs are not met.Therefore, they only carry out the tasks given simply and passively.The morale in such school is low, and the staff members feel depressed all the time.On the other hand, democratic leadership is based on equality and cooperation.The management members and the other staff members are cooperators with an equal status.Leaders respect teachers' different abilities and qualifications, trust them, and invite them to participate in the school management.Some important and big issues of the school are determined by leaders and staff members together.Leaders not only concern the work, but also the life and personal development of the staff members.In a school of such a case, staff members feel the sincerity from the leaders, and a sense of trust and admiration developed.They are ready to carry out any tasks given.People help each other, learn from each other, work actively and enthusiastically, and a strong sense of responsibility fills every one.In a school of such a case, staff members are happy to work and have a good efficiency.They are encouraged positively and usually possess a strong sense of pride, group honor, success and happiness.All these contribute to teachers' mental health.
The study is still find that university interpersonal climate is the significant influence factor to teachers' mental health.As we know, interpersonal relationship is always a very important factor to influence a person's mental health.Ding Zan believe that the adaptation of man's psychology is mainly the adaptation of the interpersonal relationship, and the morbidity of man's psychology is mainly caused by the inharmonious interpersonal relationship (Li & Zhao, 2004).Festinger (1957) believes that affinity between persons can be an effective means to melt the unhappy aspect of interpersonal relationship.When people are discussing and interacting with each other, the introduction of some cognitive factors, such as a piece of new information or suggestion, can help to get rid of the inharmonious elements, and thus lessen the worries greatly.Friendly actions between group members can effectively promote communication, as staff members can express their depression and satisfaction through communication.Ou, Pan, and Huang (2008) find that the university organizational climate is significantly correlated with teachers' mental health, and interpersonal action and interpersonal harmony are significant to teachers' mental health in regression analysis, and interpersonal climate is the positive prediction factor of teachers' mental health.Interpersonal relationship in a school usually shows itself in the inter-action relationship among leaders, staff members and students.If there is a tense relationship between management members and staff members, if they do not respect and trust, concern and support each other, it is likely to develop a kind of conflict or even hostile psychological state.And in this case, it is easy to lead to psychological clash, and further to a greater psychological distance.In a school of such case, staff members guard against each other, and estrangement, suspiciousness, hostility are the right words to describe them.They are often finding excuses not to do the job.And they often give obstacles to others' job.They do their job according to their own wills and there is no one to follow the rules in a school.In such a school, staff members feel worried, disappointed, lonely and helpless.They are living in a society without a sense of security and social support.If a person lives and works in such an environment for a long time, it is quite easy for him to develop a kind of mental problem, and thus influencing their mental health.On the other hand, in a school of a desired organizational climate, staff members concern, help and depend on each other, and they work together cooperatively, having a relatively high agreement in their goals.They feel proud to be in such a school and are willing to work there.They regard the school issues as one part of their own business.At the same time, management members, teachers and students interact freely and equally.Therefore, the sense of social security, success and respect and so on are met.And they work happily and with high efficiency.These certainly promote the development of their mental health.
This study has its limitations, firstly, the control over common method variables is not enough.Because the test is conducted by single-source subjects, the subjects are of individual differences and the measuring tools and testing situations may also affect the accuracy of the test.Moreover, the same data source, testing situation, item context and item itself may lead to a spurious relationship between predictor variables and criterion variables.Such an artificial relationship will interfere the findings of the research and generate potential systematic error for the results.Secondly, this is not an experimental research, which may limit the extrapolation validity of the results.Therefore, the future studies can control common method bias by new methods and adopt experimental method and expand the scope of the study.

Conclusion
The teachers' mental health is affected by the organizational climate in university.The administrative and interpersonal climate in universities is one significantly positive predicting variable of the teachers' mental health.
Especially the style of administrating, interpersonal communication, and interpersonal harmony climate are more significant in influencing teachers' mental health in universities.Therefore, the administrators and educational practitioners should strengthen the construction of soft power in universities, such as promoting the culture and positive organizational climate, building good organizational climate, so as to promote teachers' mental healthily development.

Table 1 .
Correlation analysis of university administrative climate and teachers' mental health (n = 826).
Note: UAC: University Administrative Climate

Table 2 .
Correlation analysis of university interpersonal climate and teachers' mental health (n = 826).

Table 3 .
Hierarchical regression analysis of UAC, UIC and Teachers' Mental Health.

Table 5 .
Regression analysis of UIC to teachers' mental health (n = 826).
The relationship between teachers and students are well, the students respect the teachers and the teachers care for the students.