The Impact of Leadership Styles on Organizational Citizenship Behavior: A Study of Non-Executive Level Employees in Apparel Industry in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The lack of OCB could be identified as a major reason for a numerous problem accruing in the apparel industry in Sri Lanka. There are many factors that affect or impact for the OCB of employees working in the apparel industry. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of leadership styles on OCB with reference to ABC (Pvt) Ltd and XYZ (Pvt) Ltd. With the support of literature, researcher identified few prominent leadership styles among those styles. Transformational, Transactional and Laissez-Faire leadership styles were identified as prominent. And the independent variables of this study were leadership style and their impact on the dependent variable of OCB. All the non-executive level employees in ABC (Pvt) Ltd and XYZ (Pvt) Ltd were selected as the population of this study and 112 non-executive level employees was selected as the sample size of this study. This is a quantitative study and primary data were collected on employees’ perceptions about their leaders’ leadership styles and their organization citizenship behavior through a questionnaire. Cronbach alpha, Pearson correlation coefficient, regression analysis and descriptive statistics were used for various analyzes of this study. The findings of this study revealed that, the three leadership styles depict a positive impact on organizational citizenship behavior. In the literature review it was found a negative impact between laissez-faire and OCB. However, in this study the laissez-faire leadership style has a positive impact on OCB but depicts week impact than transformational and transactional leadership styles. Finally, according to this study recommended the most preferable leadership style was transformational leadership style and that must be adopted by the supervisors, team leaders or the group of the apparel industry.