Leadership Styles, Perceived Organisational Politics And Employees’ Work Engagement: Evidence From Indigenous Ghanaian Banks.

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of transformational and transactional leadership styles on employees’ work engagement and the moderating effect of perceived organisational politics (POPS) among employees of some selected indigenous Banks in Ghana. The study employed the cross-sectional design and the quantitative method approach, where data was gathered with the use of standardised survey questionnaires. Structural equation modeling was used in analysing the survey data from 430 usable responses. The study found that transformational leadership influenced employees’ work engagement while transactional leadership did not have any significant impact on employee’s work engagement. Furthermore, POPS failed to moderate the relationship between both transformational and transactional leadership styles and employees’ work engagement. Finally, the study found no difference in employees’ perception of politics among the private and public banks sampled. The analysis revealed power-distance hypothesis, uncertainty avoidance, socio-economic realities and the general nature of politicking in the banking sector as some reasons why POPS failed to moderate the relationships. Again, factors such as the importance of coaching and mentoring in the organisation and the bureaucratic structure of the organisation were revealed to be reasons why varying results were found for the relationship between the two leadership styles and work engagement of employees of the sampled banks. It was thus recommended that the leaders be empowered and trained adequately to exhibit more transformational leadership attributes and behaviours in order to enhance employees’ level of engagement to their work as well as their perceptions of their organisation’s political environment.