The relationship between leadership style and employee commitment in Randfontein Health Sub-district at Gauteng Province in Johannesburg

Abstract

The Effective leaders are enablers, which leads to competent and committed employees. Studies in the literature of organisational psychology and organisational behavior have shown that leadership styles and employee commitment are of major factors to the organisational success or failure. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between leadership styles (transactional, transformational, and laissez-faire) and employee commitments (affective, continuance, and normative commitment) in the Randfontein Health Sub-district (RHSD) in, Gauteng Province. There were 115 participants in the research, including 95 academic staff 20 leaders and 95 academic staff/supervisors who were asked to give their perceptions of leadership styles. There was a non-response rate of 27.7% from 12 (RHSD). Two separate instruments, namely multifactor leadership questionnaire (MLQ) and organisational commitment questionnaire (OCQ), were used to measure leadership styles and employees' organisational commitment respectively. The findings of the study revealed that transformational leadership style has significant and positive correlations with affective and continuance employee commitments while transactional leadership style has significant and positive correlation with normative commitment only. A laissez-faire leadership style is found to be significantly and negatively associated with employees' affective commitment.