Abstract
 High quality work of scientific, pedagogical and administrative staff of universities is conditioned by their high motivation and conviction about the meaningfulness of their contribution to the science, students, and society. A deeper examination of academic motivation, made through analysis, synthesis, comparison and generalization of theoretical knowledge on leadership and motivation, indicates that motivation is influenced by many objective and subjective, quantitative and qualitative factors. Quality of managers’ influence, respectively creative content of leadership and general managerial facilitation that managers utilize in affecting work behavior and performance of employees can be include to the strongest factors which affect the motivation. Paper is intended to investigate the motivation of universities members and its conditionalities. Methodological part of the paper contains the results of sociological questioning conducted on a sample of 122 employees of University of Zilina and focuses on examining dependence of the leadership style performed from the part of managers and the strength of motivation perceived by the university members. Specifically, three basic leadership styles are examined: authoritative, neutral and participative, versus three basic dimensions of the motivation: motivation to quality work; motivation to increase own knowledge and skills; and motivation to submitting new proposals. Applying chi-square test, the dependence of leadership style and level of motivation was confirmed in all three motivational dimensions; application of creative, participative leadership causes a higher degree of motivation. Subsequently, there is investigated in the paper whether the strength of motivation is also influenced by creating an atmosphere of trust, belongingness and encouraging to new proposals by the manager, and whether creating such a positive atmosphere is affected by the quality of leadership style. Through the use of Pearson’s test and Kendall’s test, dependence was also confirmed. Conclusion of the paper presents a set of recommendations which might be contributive for the universities executives when strengthening the motivation of universities members and improving their competitiveness and contribution to society and its progress.   Keywords: university employees and managers; leadership; motivation; survey, dependence
Highlights
In current, very dynamic conditions, university teachers and managers can be understood as the knowledge workers
For research in area of creative leadership and motivation of university employees, it was used a questionnaire survey conducted at the University of Zilina in Slovakia
We focused on the exploring style and character of leadership
Summary
Very dynamic conditions, university teachers and managers can be understood as the knowledge workers. This term was used firstly through P. Knowledgeable, and most importantly, effective employee, has specific knowledge and skills and a high level of motivation (Rosak-Szyrocka, 2014); it is a virtual axiom that human action is a consequence of cognition and motivation or, put another way, knowledge and desire (Locke, 2000) Based on these ideas, we can state that knowledge, creativeness, and wisdom become the crucial factors of success and progress of every university. This is just the motivation that is the basis, source, accelerator, as well the peak of/for valuable outputs of all academicians
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