IMPACT OF LEADERSHIP STYLES ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE

Every organization expects best performance out of their each employee to achieve organizational goals. It is well known fact that leadership style of leaders play crucial role in employee performance.

 

“Since it is the duty of leaders to get things done through the coordinated efforts of others, it is assumed therefore that leadership styles will translate into the subordinates’ performance (Rollinson et al, 2001 cited in Mohammed, 2014, p. 01)”

Leadership style

“Leadership styles can be defined as the combination of traits, skills and behaviors leaders use as they interact with followers (Achua & Lussier, 2009 cited in Heerd, 2013, p.02)”.

There are 5 main leadership styles. They are Autocratic, Beauracratic, Laissez –faire, Transformational and Transactional leadership style. Each leadership style has different characteristics.

Source: visually,Five types of leadership styles

Employee Performance

“Employee performance includes executing defined duties, meeting deadlines, employee competency, and effectiveness and efficiency in doing work” (Iqbal et al, 2015).

Effect Of Leadership Styles on employee performance

Leadership and employee performance topic has been very popular among researchers and there are many researches have been ended by finding best leadership style for employee performance.

A study done by Sebestian in 2017 identify that democratic leadership style has a significant positive impact on employee performance and autocratic leadership style shows significant negative impact on employees performance. And they identified that “laissez-faire leadership has a positive significant impact on employee performance” (Sebestian, 2017)

“Wang, Oh,Courtright and Colbert conducted a study in which it was shown how transformational leadership affects the employees performance.” they identified Transformational leadership supports the performance of the team (Deringdag, 2020).

Ebrahim Hasam Al Khajeh identified that in his research that Transformational Leadership and Democratic Leadership styles have positive impact on performance while Autocratic and Transactional leadership make negative impact on performance (Khajeh, 2018). Another research done by Umar Paracha and researchers suggested that “organization should implement the mix of both transactional and transformational leadership style according to the certain situation and nature of task assigned to employees” (Paracha et al., 2012).

Conclusion

According to the earlier researches we can come up with the idea of that autocratic leadership style is not necessarily suitable for improving employee performance neither the full phase of Transactional leadership style. Laissez-fare and democratic leadership styles show positive impact on employee performance but not as Transformational Leadership style. Each studies shows that best practice for improve employee performance is Transformational Leadership style.Ultimately organizations are better to keep and train more of Transformational leaders to gain best employee performance.

Author : Thejani Jayasinghe

References

Deringdang, F., 2020. A Handbook of leadership styles. 1st ed. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Heerd, M., 2013. Intercultural Management. Leadership styles in Germany, USA and India. 1st ed. Online: GRIN Verlag.

Iqbal, N., Anwar, S., Haider, N., 2015. Effect of Leadership Style on Employee Performance. Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, [Online]. 5, 2. Available at: https://www.hilarispublisher.com/open-access/effect-of-leadership-style-on-employee-performance-2223-5833-1000146.pdf [Accessed 1 June 2020].

Mohammad, U., Yusuf, M., Sanni, I., Ifeyinwa, T., Bature, N., Kazeem, A., 2014. The Relationship between Leadership Styles and Employees’ Performance in Organizations (A Study of Selected Business Organizations in Federal Capital Territory, Abuja Nigeria). European Journal of Business and Management, [Online]. 6, 1. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.684.9954&rep=rep1&type=pdf [Accessed 31 May 2020].

Sebestian, V., 2017. Impact of leadership style on employee performance. International Journal of Accounting & Business Management , 5(2), pp. 124-125.

tarresamuffet, (2020), Five types of leadership styles [ONLINE]. Available at: https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/business/types-leadership-styles-essential-guide [Accessed 1 June 2020].