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.
