Leadership style and its influence on employee identification with the organisation: A study from a Czech hospital

Abstract

Leaders are in daily contact with subordinate employees, and through their leadership style they affect the day-to-day running of the organisation. Using the transformational leadership theory, this paper aims to explore the impact of leadership styles on organisational identification, i.e. on an important and complex variable that plays a key role in organisational effectiveness. We asked a sample of nurses from a medium-sized regional hospital to assess the prevailing leadership style of their head nurses along with the degree of their own identification with the hospital. The quantitative research design based on a questionnaire survey was applied in this study. The first part consisted of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, which measures the applied leadership style and its components. The second part was formed by the Mael and Ashforth scale, which assesses the organisational identification of the employees. The relationship between the chosen variables was assessed by multiple linear regression with the inclusion of the employment length and department type as control variables. Our results show that the transactional style slightly prevails in this hospital, although only the transformational style and two of its components have an impact on the degree of organisational identification.