The impact of leadership on organizational commitment

This study examines the impact of transactional and transformational leadership on organizational commitment as well as the mediating role of organizational justice. In today's workplace, increasing the perception of fairness amongst employees has numerous organizational benefits. What constitutes effective leadership has been widely debated. Contemporary research on employee perceptions of leadership style has revealed that these perceptions have a large impact on organizational outcomes. Leaders can positively influence such perceptions within organizations and thereby benefit organizational performance. For instance, greater organizational commitment, higher job satisfaction can result from application of appropriate leadership behaviours. To refine the scope of this study, transactional and transformational leadership are examined in relationship to perceptions of organizational justice. This study focuses especially on aspects of transformational leadership and its impact on organizational culture and behaviour within organizations in Syria. Few such studies have been undertaken so far in the Middle East and much can be learnt from extending organizational studies to non-western societies. Information was collected from 502 employees who worked in six organizations in Syria. Transactional and transformational leadership were singled out for analysis in order to assess their impact on organizational outcomes in relation to their subordinates. Two measures of organizational outcomes were selected for this study, namely job satisfaction and organizational commitment. One of the main goals of this research is developing testable hypotheses around research questions, and developing an empirically testable model linking transactional and transformational leadership through the possible mediating influences of organizational justice to individual attitudes and behaviours, specifically job satisfaction and organizational commitment. In the course of the research, four models were tested to indicate the best model that would most accurately reflect the relationship between leadership and organizational outcomes to be found in the Syrian context. Results, based on the analysis indicate that in the most validated model for the relationship between leadership and organizational commitment in the Syrian context. Transformational leadership has both direct and indirect effects on organizational commitment through interactional justice. Transformational leadership has an impact on job satisfaction through procedural and interactional justice as intermediate variable, while transactional leadership has an impact on job satisfaction through distributive justice as intermediate variable. The three types of organizational justice have an impact on organizational commitment through job satisfaction as an intermediate variable. This research tested fourteen hypotheses in order to answer the research questions. The primary research question for this study is the impact of leadership style, whether transformational or transactional, on organizational outcomes such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment within the Syrian context. A subsidiary research question concerns the role of organizational justice as an intermediate variable between leadership style and organizational outcomes. In addition, eighteen interviews were conducted to add weight to the findings from the survey results. Hence, the methodology used in the research combined both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Further research would be required to show how widely such findings on leadership are applicable, both in the Syrian context and elsewhere, but the effects of transactional and transformational leadership style on fairness perceptions in organizations deserve consideration. Another point of interest and further investigation is to assess the role of organizational justice in mediating the impact of transactional and transformational leadership on organizational outcome