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.
