Effect of leadership style and leader’s gender on employee performance: evidence from Takoradi Technical University

Abstract

The study sets out to analyse leadership styles and leader’s gender and their influence on employee’ performance at the Takoradi Technical University (TTU) as an organisation. The three specific objectives were to assess the most common leadership style at TTU, to test the difference between male and female leadership behaviours at TTU, and to assess the effect of leadership styles and leader’s gender on employee performance at TTU. The study employed a quantitative research approach and descriptive survey and inferential statistics as the study design. The study was on the views of 154 employees out of 318 from the study area with a self-administered questionnaire as the main research instrument. The results were analysed with the help of the Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS 22.0 version) software. The major findings were that transformational leadership style is more perceived to be adopted by leaders as compared to the other styles. It was also found with respect to the transformational, autocratic and laissez-faire leadership style, it was evident that female leaders have the higher leadership behaviour as compared to male leaders. However, regarding transactional leadership style, the result indicated that male leaders have the higher leadership behaviour as compared to female leaders. Finally, the results indicated that employee with female leaders report an average performance higher than their staffs with male leaders. Considering this, it was recommended that leaders should adopt more of leadership characteristics which are transformational in nature than other leadership characteristics.