Impact of Perceived leadership Style on Employees’ Job Satisfaction

Abstract

It is obvious that the organizations which have excellent leaders are successful in their business. Generally, people who are in such organizations willing to follow the leaders due to the working culture created by them. This culture induces the employees to work smart and hard. On the other hand, to what extent the subordinates believe the leader is good or bad purely the function of their perception. Therefore, perception of every individual is considered as the real force behind behavior of people. In many cases, people perceive others contradictorily than the reality. Leaders may practice different type of leadership styles in the organization, but the subordinates may perceive something different from the actual one. Due to the perceived leadership style of the leaders, subordinates feel satisfaction or dissatisfaction on their job. In this context, job satisfaction of the subordinates who are working in the government department is determined by what they perceived about the leadership tyle of the respective heads of the departments. This research study analyzed the relationship between perceived leadership style and the job satisfaction of the employees. The main objective of the study is to find out the relationship between perception of the employees with regard to the leadership style of the leader and the job satisfaction of them. For this purpose, 100 employees have been selected from Divisional secretary’s offices and the zonal educational offices. Interviews and questionnaires were used to collect relevant data. This study set out two main hypotheses. The first hypothesis was ‘task-oriented leadership leads to lower the job satisfaction’. It was accepted (r=-0.68). The second hypothesis was ‘people-oriented leadership leads to higher the job satisfaction’. It is also accepted (r=0.54). The majority of the employees said that the leader should be strong enough to take decisions and implement them and be unbiased. And further they remarked work motivation and satisfaction is killed in the office by the leadership style practiced by leaders. The research finds out that even though the majority (65%) of the leaders is people oriented, they perceived as task-oriented leaders. Therefore, it is inevitable the leaders to be transparent and to have effective communication system to develop right image.