THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLE AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT: THE CASE OF DASHEN BANK S.C

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 Dashen Bank in Addis Ababa. The study design was descriptive in which quantitative data sets were to describe the state of affair. In order to collect primary data via questionnaire from 24 leaders and112 Dashen bank employees, and used along with secondary data. The questionnaire was adopted from previous studies and was used to quantify the perception of the respondents towards the practice leadership style while the researcher carried out correlation analysis on the collected data to determine the effect of relationship between leadership style and employee commitment. The samples size involved by using stratified sampling at branches in Addis Ababa. The researcher organized and analyzed the data collected from questionnaires by the help of SPSS version 20. The findings of the study revealed that transformational leadership style has significant and positive relationship 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.