Relationship between Perceived Leadership Styles and Organizational Commitment: the Case of the African Union Commission Headquarters
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Date
2016-06
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Addis Ababa Univerisity
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between leadership styles and employees’ organizational commitment at the AUC Headquarters. Thus, attempts were made to provide answers to the following basic questions: (1) What is the dominant leadership style in the AUC Headquarters, from the perception of employees? (2) What is the dominant dimension of organizational commitment prevailing in the AUC Headquarters from the perception of employees? (3) What is the relationship between leadership styles of supervisors and organizational commitment of employees in the AUC Headquarters? The descriptive study was used since the focus of this study is on the current relationship between leadership styles and organizational commitment in the AUC Headquarters. The study made use of both primary and secondary sources. The primary data were collected from staff members at the AUC Headquarters through questionnaires and interviews. Secondary data were obtained from the existing literature in previous research paper findings, journal articles, books, studies, websites as well as data from the AHRM. For the purpose of gathering the quantitative data for this study, the simple random sampling technique was used to select participants for the questionnaire of the study. Out of a population of 1129 staff, a sample of 283 was randomly drawn to achieve a confidence level of 95%. Two separate instruments, namely the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ), were used to measure supervisors’ leadership styles and employees’ organizational commitment respectively. In order to collect qualitative data through the interviews, both purposive and availability sampling were employed to select staff in leadership positions, i.e. Directors of Departments/Directorates and Heads of Offices and the interviews were conducted with a total of 5 respondents. Descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation were used while inferential statistics such as two tailed Pearson correlation were used. The findings revealed that although transformational leadership was the dominant one, it was not practiced effectively at the AUC since leaders were not exhibiting the ideal levels of transformational leadership behaviors. The most dominant dimension of organizational commitment in the AUC was affective commitment. The study also indicated that there is a weak positive relationship between transformational leadership and affective, continuance and normative commitment at the AUC while transactional leadership has a negative and very weak correlation with continuance commitment. Laissez-faire leadership has a positive but relatively weak relationship with affective commitment while it has a negative though very weak relationship with continuance commitment and normative commitment. Hence, the study concluded that transformational and transactional leadership behaviors play a more important role in developing and improving affective, continuance and normative commitment than the laissez-faire leadership style at the AUC. Finally, the study recommended that the AUC engages in different leadership development initiatives so as to enable its leaders reach the ideal levels of transformational leadership behaviors and that the AUC further designs policies which continuously sustain or increase organizational commitment behaviors displayed by the AUC staff as committed employees are key to the achievement of organizational goals.
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Leadership styles, Organizational commitment, AUC