Employees' perception of leadership behaviour in retail banking

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine how subordinates describe their immediate supervisor's leadership behaviours and to understand the employees' perceptions of their immediate supervisor's relations-oriented and task-oriented leadership behaviours in retail banking. The 100 item LBDQ XII instrument employed was focussed on describing relations-oriented and task-oriented leadership behaviours. This questionnaire has been used in several countries to study leadership behaviour as mentioned in Littrell (2002), and has also been used in South Africa by Littrell and Nkomo (2005). Research participants in the research included 288 employees in Retail Banking in Johannesburg. These employees were located at Head Office in Johannesburg. The research findings on how the subordinates describe their immediate supervisor's leadership behaviour in retail banking, suggest that retail banking leaders were perceived by their subordinates as exhibiting both relations-oriented and task-oriented leadership behaviour. This explains why there was very little difference in the mean scores of all twelve subscales of the LBDQ Questionnaire. According to Klimoski and Hayes (1980), a similar pattern of relations-oriented and task-oriented leadership behaviour was observed in a production department of a large-processing firm. The study concluded that performance and job satisfaction were enhanced if the supervisors demonstrated the behaviours that were both task centred and supportive. However, mean scores for other items of the subscales suggest some need for improvement.