THE SUITABILITY OF ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE OF AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION AGENTS AND ITS IMPACT IN THEIR CAREER EMPOWERMENT.

The population of this study consisted of 70% of agricultural extension agents employed by Extension and Cooperative Department in Baghdad as of October, 2018 (N=91). The scale was developed to determine the suitability of the organizational structure and the functional empowerment of workers in agricultural extension. It consists of two parts. The first part included measuring the suitability of the organizational structure of the workers, consisting of (79) items distributed on (9) axes, placed under a quadrilateral scale (agree, agree, not sure, disagree), and standard weights were given (0,1,2,3) score respectively for positive clauses, and inversely for negative clauses, Thus, the numerical values of the relevance scale ranged between (0-237) degrees. As for the second part of the scale that included job empowerment for employees, it included (41) items under five axes in light of the same scale that was adopted to measure the suitability and thus the numerical values of the measure of the level of job empowerment ranged between (0 - 123) degrees, and to assess the stability of the scale were An exploratory sample was taken from the research community, outside the sample, and the (Feckernbach) coefficient was used, which reached a value of (86.0), (0.89) for the scale of relevance and empowerment, respectively, which indicates that the scale has a high degree of stability.The study showed that the organizational structure of the Agricultural Extension and Cooperative Department was unsuitable for most agricultural extension agents and the extension organization is permeated by weakness in its ability to develop its performance, and weakness in exploitation of human sources. Also, it is showed that administrative communications are moving in one direction from top to bottom, and level of using technology was very low. This study further illustrated that linkage with other agricultural organizations was very weak. In addition, the study showed that level of functional empowerment of agricultural extension workers was moderate and tends to decrease due to lack of motivation, weakness in delegation of powers, and inappropriate work environment for most agricultural extension workers. The study included recommendations that address the obstacles and problems faced the organizational structure to improve the performance of agricultural extension agents and to achieve the functional empowerment.