The Relationship Between Perceived Leadership Styles of Officers and Organizational Commitment of Members in Loose Organization X in Metro Manila, Philippines

Abstract

Over the past several decades, organizational researchers have consistently demonstrated the empirical link between leadership styles and organizational commitment in tightly-coupled business organizations. In comparison, available literature on loose organizations—such as volunteer groups, protest groups, and union groups—as a study population revealing the link between these two constructs is limited, with some providing contradictory results to previous research. Therefore, this study intends to determine the relationship between the officers’ leadership styles (i.e. laissez-faire, transactional, transformational, charismatic) and the members’ organizational commitment (i.e. affective, normative, continuance) in Loose Organization X. Forty-one respondents of Loose Organization X—5 officers and 36 members—participated in this study. Results showed that transformational leadership scored the highest with an average of 4.11 (SD = .725) among the officers, while normative commitment of the members scored the highest with an average of 5.70 (SD = 1.08). Lastly, through Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, findings indicated that there exists a significant positive relationship between all four leadership styles and organizational commitment, with charismatic leadership correlating the strongest to commitment. To conclude, these results provide new insights on the relationship between leadership styles and organizational commitment in loose organizations. Although the paper also contributes to the lack of studies related to the two constructs in loose organizations based in the Philippines, further investigations are recommended to provide clarity regarding the relationships between the two variables.