Impact of Perceived Leadership Behaviours of Principal Partners on Work Outcome of Graduate Quantity Surveyors
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Date
2011-06-19
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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the general perception of graduate quantity surveyors of the leadership behaviours of their supervisors and their effects on their work outcomes such as Job satisfaction, Organisational commitment, and Productivity.
Most researchers have evaluated leadership effectiveness with regards to the consequences of the leader’s actions on followers and organizations. Literature on perceived leadership’s impact on employee work outcomes in the construction sector appear limited, especially those that relate to Ghanaian graduate quantity surveyors. This problem is attributed to little understanding of construction experts for social science.
Questionnaires used included: Kouzes and Posner’s (1987) Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI); Spector’s (1983) Job Satisfaction Survey scale (JSS), Porter et al.’s (1974) Organisational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) scale; and McNeese-Smith’s (1991) scale for Productivity. Also examined was the relationship between the demographic characteristics of the respondents and the outcomes. The respondents included 28 graduate surveyors selected through a combination of purposive and snowball sampling approaches from Architectural and Engineering Services Limited (AESL) in 9 regional offices of Ghana.
The results indicated that there were significant relationships between leadership behaviours and employee outcomes of Job satisfaction and Organisational commitment. However, the correlation between leadership behaviours and Productivity was low at the 0.05 significance level. While the job satisfaction and organizational outcomes related significantly, none of the two related to the productivity outcome in any significant way. There was no significant relationship between demographic variables and employee outcomes.
Stepwise regression analysis was used to determine how the five leadership behaviours-Inspire a Shared Vision, Model the Way, Challenge the Process, Encourage the Heart and Enable Others to Act associated with the work outcomes. Encourage the Heart and Challenge the Process accounted for the greatest amount of variance (R2=56.1%) in the Job satisfaction model. Encourage the Heart explained the total variance (R2=41.9%) in employee commitment to the organisation. The leadership behaviours did not associate with graduate productivity significantly.
The survey was done on samples from 9 regional offices out of the 10 in Ghana. The sample size was small compared to the number of graduate quantity surveyors employed by AESL. An expanded sample covering all regions and more employees would have produced an increased understanding of the relationships.
This study showed that heads of AESL in the regions demonstrate only moderate knowledge of the practices of Kouzes and Posner’s transformational leadership and calls for academic and professional bodies to incorporate leadership training in their curricula for graduate quantity surveyors and their heads.
Description
A thesis submitted to the Department of Building Technology,Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, in partial fulfilment for the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy, 2011