The impact of project managers’ leadership style on employees’ job satisfaction, performance and turnover

Abstract

Behavioral theory of leadership, divides leaders into two groups of "task-oriented" and "relationship-oriented" leaders. According to this theory, task-oriented leaders' priority is achieving projected results for current tasks, whereas relationship-oriented leaders focus on employees and try to improve them and take into consideration their ideas and suggestions. The current research intends to discover the extent to which employees' level of job satisfaction, quality of performance and rate turnover are affected by the leader's style. The employees of Iranian oil&gas projects were selected as the target population for this study. An online survey was selected as the method of data collection. 100 employees from different projects participated in the survey. The collected data were analyzed using independent sample t-test. The results of the analysis showed that in all the three research areas there was a significant difference between the employees of task-oriented project managers and those who work with relationship-oriented project managers, while the latter group scored higher.