| Abstract: | The effective leaders are enablers that directly points to competent and committed employees.
Studies in the organizational psychology and organizational behavior literatures have shown
that leadership styles and employee commitment are of major factors to the organizational
success or failure. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between
leadership styles (transactional, transformational, and laissez-faire) and employee commitments
(affective, continuance, and normative commitment) in Private Higher Education Institutions
(PHEIs) at Addis Ababa City. By using stratified and simple random sampling techniques, 115
participants- included 95 academic staff and 20 leaders- were involved in a research from
purposively selected 12 PHEIs with a non-response rate of 27.7%. Two separate instruments,
namely multifactor leadership questionnaire (MLQ) and organizational commitment
questionnaire (OCQ), were used to measure leadership styles and employees’ organizational
commitment respectively. The study was designed as the cross - sectional survey for the
quantitative study. The survey data was processed using an SPSS (version 16). Descriptive
statistics to calculate mean and standard deviations of leaders’ answers to leadership styles in
order to determine their perceptions, Two-tailed Pearson correlation analysis to investigate the
relationship between variables and T-tests to compare the MLQ of leaders and employees
responses (independent samples) were used. The findings of the study revealed that
transformational leadership style has significant and positive correlations with affective and
continuance employee commitments while transactional leadership style has significant and
positive correlation with only normative commitment. A laissez-faire leadership style is found to
be significantly and negatively associated with employees’ affective commitment |
