Investigating the relationship between leadership styles and organisational commitment in selected South African Universities: the mediating role of Ubuntu

Abstract

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the relationship between authentic, participative leadership and employee affective commitment with the mediation role of Ubuntu within the selected South African universities. A lot of studies have been conducted to explore, investigate and measure the impact and or the influence of leadership, but the study was aimed at including Ubuntu as a mediator role to see whether Ubuntu can enhance the affective commitment of employees. The problem which the study sought to investigate was the inclusion of employees from different ethnic backgrounds to work collectively as a team. The study used Ubuntu as an indicator to reveal whether employees recognise and embrace values Ubuntu The structured online questionnaires were distributed via email across the selected universities to be completed by support staff in all levels. The online 205 questionnaires were completed, the majority of the participants were African ethnic group (67%) and females (61%) counterparts. The Anova, Pearson product-moment correlation and linear regression analysis were performed. The linear regression found a significant correlation between both participative leadership and authentic leadership with employee affective commitment. But however the correlation of participative leadership, Ubuntu and employee affective commitment indicated medium effect whilst authentic leadership indicated a strong correlation with Ubuntu and employee affective commitment. The study concluded that authentic leadership was more effective in enhancing employee affective commitment rather than participative leadership. The study recommends that the leaders should create within the workforce that practises activities which collaborative, participative, involvement, collective in nature to make participative leadership effective and successful.