The Relationship between Leadership Styles and Employee Commitment in Private Higher Education Institutions at Addis Ababa City

Abstract

The effective leaders are enablers that directly points to competent and committed employees. Studies in the organizational psychology and organizational behavior literatures have shown that leadership styles and employee commitment are of major factors to the organizational success or failure. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between leadership styles (transactional, transformational, and laissez-faire) and employee commitments (affective, continuance, and normative commitment) in Private Higher Education Institutions (PHEIs) at Addis Ababa City. By using stratified and simple random sampling techniques, 115 participants- included 95 academic staff and 20 leaders- were involved in a research from purposively selected 12 PHEIs with a non-response rate of 27.7%. Two separate instruments, namely multifactor leadership questionnaire (MLQ) and organizational commitment questionnaire (OCQ), were used to measure leadership styles and employees’ organizational commitment respectively. The study was designed as the cross - sectional survey for the quantitative study. The survey data was processed using an SPSS (version 16). Descriptive statistics to calculate mean and standard deviations of leaders’ answers to leadership styles in order to determine their perceptions, Two-tailed Pearson correlation analysis to investigate the relationship between variables and T-tests to compare the MLQ of leaders and employees responses (independent samples) were used. The findings of the study revealed that transformational leadership style has significant and positive correlations with affective and continuance employee commitments while transactional leadership style has significant and positive correlation with only normative commitment. A laissez-faire leadership style is found to be significantly and negatively associated with employees’ affective commitment