Secondary school headteachers’ leadership styles and teachers’ organizational commitment in Tororo Municipality

Abstract

The commitment and maximum utilization of an organization’s human resource among others accelerates the achievement of the organizations’ vision, goals, and values. The organization’s leadership plays a critical part in mobilising, motivating and focussing the employees to achieving its tasks. This study aimed at investigating how secondary school headteachers’ leadership styles affects teachers’ organizational commitment in Tororo Municipality. Using a cross-sectional survey, 178 teachers, were selected using stratified and simple random sampling, with 10 deputies, and 10 headteachers having been selected on account of the selection of their schools. The participants completed the Bass and Avolio (1997) Multifactor Leadership Scale and Allen and Meyer (1996) Organizational Commitment Scale, which considered leadership styles as comprising of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership. Using SPSS 20, descriptive statistics and bivariate correlation coefficients were computed. The results revealed that all the leadership styles had non-significant effect on overall organizational commitment, and its dimensions. However, laissez faire leadership style significantly specifically affected affective component of commitment (0.186**). On the other hand transformational leadership had a significant negative effect on, affective commitment (-0.145*). In conclusion, it was recommended that Headteachers, School Board, and Higher education officials foster transformational and transactional leadership styles to elicit high level of commitment among teachers.