"TL, support call po": An Explanatory Inquiry into Employees' Lived Experiences with Perceived Leadership Styles and their Impact on Work Performance in a Philippine-Based BPO Company

Abstract

The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is one of the largest in the country. However, it faces challenges of low employee performance and high turnover. Given the hierarchical structure of BPOs, managers play a crucial role in influencing employee life cycle and performance. Despite the industry's significance, there is a need for more research on leadership styles and employee performance in the Philippine BPO context to help companies adopt performance-improving practices.. These issues warranted the study to explore how the perceived leadership style of employees on their manager shapes their performance in the workplace by characterizing the manager's perceived leadership style, perceived impact of the leadership style on them, and how they saw it manifest to their performance in the workplace. Through a descriptive explanatoryl study, shared experiences emerged four leadership themes: "Employee acknowledgment," "Compassionate Leadership," "Performance Monitoring," and "Negative Leadership." "Employee acknowledgment" and "Compassionate leadership" positively affected the task, adaptive, and contextual performance, creating a career-conducive environment. In contrast, "Negative leadership" had an adverse effect on employees, making them demoralized and desiring to leave the company.Conversely, "Performance Monitoring" showed no direct influence on employee performance. The manager's leadership style impacts employee performance through their involvement level. A blend of transformational and transactional practices enhances performance via recognition, incentives, and healthier manager-employee relationships. Conversely, demoralizing actions and micromanagement lead to demotivation and resentment. Future studies need to explore the application of other leadership theories in exploring the relationship between leadership style and employee performance.