Organisational Culture, Leadership style and employee commitment in public organisations: A Case Study of Ghana Prison Service, Central Region

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to examine how organisational culture and leadership styles can affect employee commitment in the public organisations using Ghana Prison Service (GPS), Central Region as a case study. The study adopted the descriptive survey design. The sample size for the study was 112, made up of 34 junior officers, 22 senior officers, and 56 non-commission officers of the GPS. The stratified sampling technique that makes use of the lottery method of simple random sampling was used to select the respondents. Questionnaire was the sole data collection instrument used with a reliability coefficient of 0.87. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data. The findings of the study revealed that transformational leadership has been observed to be practiced at GPS, and that leadership style and organisational culture have influence on employees’ commitment to the GPS. The study indicated and concludes that the more employees of the GPS perceive the various leadership styles adopted by their immediate supervisors positively the more they become committed to the organisation. Furthermore, leadership style played a major role in nurturing the appropriate organisational culture which helped to improve the implementation of specific government reforms. Also, organisational culture and leadership style of officers of GPS in the Central Region of Ghana only predict employees’ commitment to the service when officers or employees of the organisation are satisfied with their job. The study recommends that management officers of the GPS should have the right person to do the right job and lead employees with appropriate and meaningful leadership style to increase their satisfaction with the job.