The Relationship Of Community College Staff\u27s Job Satisfaction To Administration\u27s Leadership Style: A Correlational Study

Today, higher education faces more social, cultural, accreditation, and funding opportunities than they have faced in the past and it is important for staff to have job satisfaction to assist the colleges to meet these opportunities. Higher education leaders are increasingly recognizing that to keep the institutions doors open financially, they must have staff that are satisfied with their jobs and thus are placing a greater emphasis on meeting the staffs’ expectations and needs. This will allow for the staff to assist with the opportunities that those in higher education are facing today. The purpose of this study was to examine quantitatively the correlation between the leadership styles of community college leaders and the satisfaction level of staff. Ultimately, this research study extended the literature that pertained to the relationship between leadership the predictive variable has on staff satisfaction the criterion variable and examined whether specific types of leadership supports staff satisfaction quantitatively at the community college level. This study was a correlation research design, using 130 participants that are employed as staff for a community college in Texas. Data was collected from two questionnaires, the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire 5X (MLQ 5X) assessment tool developed by Avolio and Bass (2000) and a Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS) developed by Spector (1985) delivered through an employee email survey portal. The study explored the relationship between the three leadership styles transformational, transactional, and passive avoidance as related to staffs’ job satisfaction and allowed the researcher to investigate relational trends to determine if there are any positive and negative associations. A one-way ANOVA was used to analyze the means and test the hypothesis. The significance level for all three leadership styles was