Leading the Leaders: Correlation between Leadership Styles of the School Heads and Organizational Commitment of the Teachers in a Private School in Marikina City

Abstract

Over the past decades, leadership has emerged as a highly researched topic in numerous fields within organizations (Tirmizi, 2002). The ways how leaders lead their organizations is also associated with their members’ level of commitment (Bickes & Yilmaz, 2020). However, not much studies about leadership styles and commitment were conducted in smaller-scaled organizations. Therefore, this study intends to determine the correlation between the school heads’ leadership styles (i.e., authoritarian, democratic, laissez-faire) and the teachers’ organizational commitment (i.e., affective, continuance, normative) in Private School X. Thirty-one faculty members of Private School X—5 school heads and 26 teachers—participated in this study. Results showed that democratic leadership style scored the highest with 25.6 (M = 4.27) among the school heads, while affective commitment of the teachers scored the highest with 33.19 (M = 5.53). Lastly, through Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, findings indicated the following relationships: (1) a strong positive relationship between authoritarian style and organizational commitment, (2) a moderately negative relationship between democratic style and organizational commitment, and (3) a strong negative relationship between laissez-faire style and organizational commitment. To conclude, these results provide new insights on the relationship between leadership styles and organizational commitment. Although the paper also contributes to the lack of studies related to leadership styles and organizational commitment in smaller-scaled organizations in the Philippines, further investigations are recommended to provide a better clarity regarding the relationships between the two variables.