An Empirical Evidence of the Effect of Leadership Styles on Faculty Staff Performance at Universities in Ghana

Abstract

(2013) argued that leadership style has been largely attributed to the success or failure of formal organisations, nations and other social units. Hukpati (2009) perceived that leadership is a fundamental aspect of management in that it has an important bearing on a range of activities that leading to the attainment of organisational outcomes. The study of leadership over the past few decades from literature focused on leadership styles and how leadership influences organisations. Researchers including Binfor et al (2013) writing on leadership reasoned that many definitions, explanations and proposals on styles and models have been presented by academics, authors and institutions. Currently, leadership and its role to business and organisations are receiving special unusual prominence in the global world.Much of the interest however in the area of leadership research from these researchers are based on the obvious claims that leadership is linked to organisational performance. But to Owusu-Bempahet al (2011), leadership and management scandals and leadership failures in various organisations at national and international levels and the Abstract: This paper is an empirical evidence of the effect of leadership styles on faculty staff performance within universities in Ghana. About 330 respondents sampled from ten public and private universities responded to questionnaires and used for the analysis. A quantitative research paradigm was employed and data was analysed by use of SPSS. It is evident from the study that different leadership styles affect faculty staff performance and that leadership skills truly do matter in improving performance of staff and hopefully, the leadership style practiced at universities could be incorporated. The regression results portray positive and statistically insignificant relationship between Autocratic Leadership Style and Employees’ Performance. Further, the study showed a positive and statistically significant relationship between Authentic Leadership Style and Employees’ Performance at one percent alpha level among others. This research guides prospective entrepreneurs and governments among others who seek to establish universities as to knowing leadership practices by management for effective performance of faculty to becoming globally competitive. Further, it gives an empirical data from a developing country perspective relating to management effectiveness at tertiary institutions in terms of leadership practices. Suggestions for universities in Ghana are presented and finally future studies are highlighted in the study. This present study considered different leadership styles (four) and how these leadership styles affected faculty staff performance adding to the literature on other leadership styles equally affecting performance. The regression results portray positive and statistically insignificant relationship between Autocratic Leadership Style and Employees’ Performance. The finding also discovers a positive and statistically significant relationship between Authentic Leadership Style and Employees’ Performance. The coefficient of Authentic Leadership Style. 248, implies that a unit change in Authentic Leadership Style will increase Employees’ Performance by .248, all other things being equal. The regression result further showed positive statistically significant relationship between Democratic Leadership Style and Employees’ Performance. The coefficient of Democratic Leadership Style is .180, which implies that a unit change in Democratic Leadership Style will increase Employees’ Performance by.180, all other things being constant. There is also a statistically positive significant relationship between Laissez faire Leadership Style and Employees’ Performance. Laissez faire Leadership Style has co-efficient of .186. This means that a unit change in Laissez faire Leadership Style will cause Employees’ Performance to change by .186, all other things being constant. The regression results obtained co-efficient of determination of r 2 = .566, which shows that approximately 57 percent of variations in the Employees’ Performance is jointly explained by Autocratic Leadership Style, Authentic Leadership Style, Democratic Leadership Style and Laissez faire Leadership Style. This means that about 33 percent of Employees’ Performance is explained by other factors. The values of standardized coefficients communicate which of the explanatory variables best predicts the explained variable. Comparatively, it is observed from the table that the most important predictor of the explanatory variables is found to be Authentic Leadership Style followed by Democratic Leadership Style and Laissez faire Leadership Style.