The Impact of Leadership Styles on the Job Satisfaction of Employees in a Garment Factory of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Job satisfaction is a common but important theme discussed at organizational level. It refers to the attitude and feelings that the people have about their work. Main concern of every organization is to maintain the satisfaction of the employees so that the organizational goals can be achieved successfully. Job satisfaction of the employees can be determined by many factors. Among them, leadership style followed by the leaders is also one of the important factors. Leadership style is the manner and approach of providing direction, implementing plans and motivating people.Many scholars have addressed the impact of leadership styles on the job satisfaction of employees in different manner. But, literature on this topic in the context of Sri Lanka has not sufficiently developed. There are only few studies covered the subject of leadership in Sri Lanka particularly limiting to few sectors. Therefore, this study attempts to fill that gap of the knowledge by addressing how leadership styles affect job satisfaction of the employees, particularly in a garment factory in Sri Lanka. Methodologically, deductive testing theory approach was followed by this study. Theory was developed by the literature based on the pilot study.  As the pilot study confirmed that three major leadership styles such as democratic, autocratic and transactional style are followed by the leaders, the impact of these three styles on the job satisfaction of employees were examined by giving a questionnaire to a stratified random sample of 60 employees. Basic hypothesis of the study was that the transactional leadership style should be the most significant in determining the job satisfaction according to human nature. But the outcome of this study confirmed that the impact of democratic style was statistically more significant than autocratic and transactional styles by rejecting the initial hypothesis.