Effects of Leadership Styles on Employees Job Performance: A Case Study of a Public Sector Organization in Ghana

Institutions are supervised by managers who are expected to direct their subordinates towards the achievements of organizational goals. Achievement of goals in an organization largely depends on the relationship between the supervisors and subordinates. Leadership styles play a crucial role in every organization in terms of industrial harmony and achievement of goals. Managers depending on the situation could employ democratic, autocratic or laissez-faire leadership styles to get organizational goals and objectives achieved. Primary data from public sector employees was used for this study based on the objectives of the study. Data was gathered from 50 employees using closed-ended questionnaires. The number of respondents was selected randomly from a population of 135 and determined using Yamane, 1974 formula and Browly proportional formula as indicated by Kumar 1976. The questionnaire were divided into three sections thus background characteristics of the respondents, respondents’ perception of their superiors’ leadership styles, employees’ assessment of their job performance respectively. The leadership styles were categorized autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire. The leadership and performance scales were measured using a 5-point Likert scale thus, 5=strongly agree; 4=agree; 3=undecided; 2=disagree; 1=strongly disagree. The outcome of the research was to the effect leadership exist in organizations have positive or negative impact on the job performance of workers. The results showed that a democratic leadership style has a significant positive impact on job performance within an organization, while autocratic and laissez-faire leadership styles contribute to apathy and lower work performance. Moreover, it was suggested among other things that the use of laissez-faire and autocratic styles should be discouraged since they are could be a recipe of creating lawless working environment which could result in low productivity.