The Relationship between Leadership Styles and Employees' Organizational Commitment (A Case of Debre Berhan University of Ethiopia)

Abstract

Human resource is one of the essential factors for organizational success of any type. Particularly, it is a vivid fact that organizational commitment of academic staffs in the tertiary level institutions is interesting and vital because of the great importance they have in creating qualified and educated graduates to the country. This research is then aimed at assessing the relationship between leadership styles (Transformational, Transactional and Laissez-faire) and employees’ organizational commitment (Affective, Continuance and Normative commitment) in the case of Debre Birhan University. Respondents were purposively grouped into two (Academic and Administrative) and probability sampling technique called stratified sampling was applied to each stratum and the total sample size of 242 (22 leaders and 220 employees) respondents were considered. Two separate instruments Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire and Organizational Commitment Questionnaire were used to measure leadership styles and employees’ organizational commitment respectively. Finally, the responses of the respondents were analyzed using SPSS (version 16.0).The findings of the study revealed that Transformational Leadership style has a moderate, significant positive relationship with affective commitment while weak, but significant positive relationship with both continuance and normative commitment. While Transactional Leadership style has weak, but significant and positive correlation with all dimensions of commitments and Laissez-faire leadership style has extremely low, but insignificant, negative association with all dimensions of commitments. The overall finding of this study suggest that Leadership style do play important roles in determining levels of affective, continuance and normative commitments, especially Transformational and Transactional leadership styles. So, the institution’s leaders should improve the level of employees’ commitment, especially affective commitment dimension, and retain them through actually practicing effective type of leadership styles and creating conducive environment to employees.