The effect of leadership styles on organizational commitment: A study of ethiopian public universities

Leadership has attracted a significant amount of scholarly attention in the past decades even though most research and theoretical contributions are to a greater extent limited to the western leadership practices. Universities success in achieving their mission depends on the leaders’ capability and leadership style that is being implemented which in turn bring faculty organizational commitment. By using appropriate leadership style, academic leaders can influence their faculty's organizational commitment positively. The major purpose of this study is, therefore, aimed to examine the impact of leadership style on faculty's organizational commitment at five selected Ethiopian public universities. Accordingly, data were collected from 402 faculty members using purposive and simple random sampling technique. The instruments used to collect data were adapted from Multifactor Leadership Questionnaires (MLQ) raterform to measure the leadership style exercised by Heads of departments and Deans and Meyer & Allen measures of organizational commitment. Primary data was collected from faculty members and department heads of five public higher education institutions. By design, the study is both descriptive and quantitative correlational research using cross sectional survey method. In this study, descriptive statistics, factor analysis, Pearson correlation, multiple linear regression analysis are performed to analyse the data. The study indicates that transformational leadership& transactional leadership styles are positively and significantly correlated with organizational commitment. However, the correlation among these constructs are very weak, indicating that all the components of transformational leadership, and transactional leadership could not as such strongly promote the increment of organizational commitment of faculties. The result showed that transformational leadership style explained the variance on organizational commitment better than transactional and laissez faire leadership behaviours demonstrated by heads and deans. Therefore, universities are recommended to emphasize more on transformational leadership behaviours which can help improve organizationalcommitment. So as to enhance faculty organizational commitment through effective leadership,the ministry of education, university boards and top management of public universities are recommended to improve competencies of deans and heads of departments through facilitating and providing training on higher education leadership dynamics.