An assessment of leadership styles and their impact on employees’ performance: a case study of Kumasi Technical Institute
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Date
2008-11-17
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Abstract
Leadership is vitally important at all levels within the company. Leadership is the moral and intellectual ability to visualize and work for what is best for the company and its employees (Mullins, 2006).
This research assessed leadership styles and their impact on employees’ performance at
Kumasi Technical Institute. The underlying problem for the research was that the
employees of the institute did not really comprehend the reason why the Principal was occasionally strict on his decisions and sometimes flexible on certain issues. This according to some of the employees had made it very difficult to predict the behaviour of the leader. Accordingly, he had won the approval of some employees while at the same time had encountered the discontentment of some of them.
The literature reviewed, covers areas such as traits, behavioural, styles, and contingency and situational theories of leadership. The rest are: educational leadership, ‘fellowship’, performance management, and motivation. The conceptual framework of the study was also formulated. The research methodology involved interviews conducted with the Principal as well as the vice principal administration (VP1) of the Institute. Questionnaires were also administered to the Heads of department (HODs), course officers (COs) as well as the sampled teaching staff. The interviews and the questionnaires were used to solicit data on leadership style, employees’ performance, motivation and the contribution of employees to leadership at Kumasi Technical Institute. Data obtained from each of the research instruments were then analyzed. Thus it was realized that employees always need to have leaders in other to achieve high levels of performance; but the leader(s) might not necessarily be almost always present at the work environment before employees perform. Again it came to light that there is no specific leadership style that really has the ability to influence employees’ performance in general and that multiplicity of leadership style could improve performance at KTI. Through Pearson’s chi-square test it was concluded that there is a relationship between leadership characteristics and sensitivity to employees needs at KTI. However, no significant relationship was found between employees’ performance at the institute and leadership style. Suitable recommendations have been suggested accordingly and this could be found at last segment of this work.
Description
A thesis presented to the Department of Managerial Science,
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in partial
fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Master of Business Administration, 2008