The impact of leadership styles on employees’ psychological empowerment, in Greek sport departments

Abstract

Effective leadership is a matter of constant concern as a sequence of factors hampers employees’ capabilities and their progress, team spirit, the establishment of collaboration, a common vision for the future, policymaking and finally, the configuration of a healthy workplace environment. The present research aimed to examine the effects/correlations of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles on employees psychological empowerment in the context of local Greek municipalities. The sample of the research constituted 29 managers and 247 employees of local Greek municipalities, of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, of Western Macedonia and of Central Macedonia. To investigate the specific concern, the managers completed the multifactor leadership questionnaire of Bass and Avolio (1997), and the employees completed the psychological empowerment instrument of Spreitzer (1995). For the statistical data analysis, SPSS 20 was used. More specifically, regression analysis was used for the variables that satisfied the affair of regularity, while for those variables that were not satisfactory, non-parametric Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was used. The non-parametric Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient shows that self-determination, as a dimension of psychological empowerment, had a strong positive correlation with idealized influence attributes (IIA) (r=0.492; p=0.007), and strong negative correlation with idealized influence behaviour (IIB) (r=-0.421; p=0.023) of the transformational leadership style. In contrast, neither the transactional style nor the laissez-faire style had strong effects with any dimension of psychological empowerment. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.