The Impact of Leadership Behaviors Upon Job Satisfaction, Productivity, and Organizational Commitment of Followers

OBJECTIVE
To identify the leadership behaviors which impact followers and to assess how this relationship may affect productivity, organizational commitment and job satisfaction.

METHODOLOGY
The sample involved managers from two median-sized hospitals near Seattle. They completed the LPI-Self and provided demographic information. Up to 15 of their subordinates completed the LPI-Other, along with an Organizational Commitment Scale (Porter, et al., 1974), Job in General - Satisfaction Scale (Smith, et al., 1975), and 15-item productivity scale designed for this study. Forty-one managers and 471 followers supplied usable data. Most of the managers (76%) and employees were female (81%). As expected, the managers tended to be somewhat older than the employee sample; they also had higher educational levels as well. Time in position did not vary between managers and employees.

KEY FINDINGS
Managers rated themselves highest in Enabling and lowest in Inspiring, which corresponded with employees' assessments. However, correlations between LPI-Self and LPI-Other scores were generally not statistically significant, with self scores typically higher than scores provided by others. "The six highest rated leaders tended to be rated as high or higher by the followers than by self; lowest rated leaders rated themselves much higher than the followers did" (182).

"The data consistently revealed a positive correlation, statistically significant to the .001 level, between each of the leadership behaviors, and the three follower outcome variables" (172). Stepwise regression analysis was used to determine how the various leadership practices impacted the outcome variables. Modeling accounted for the greatest amount of variance in productivity and Enabling explained the greatest amount of variance around both job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The amounts of explained variance (R2), while statistically significant, were modest in all cases.

Also Published As:
Author: Donna Kathryn McNeese-Smith
Title: "Increasing Employee Productivity, Job Satisfaction, and Organizational Commitment," Hospital & Health Services Administration, 41(2), 1996:160-175