Leadership Styles and Voluntary Work Behaviors: Mediating Role of Leaders’ Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

The primary aim of this study was to examine the relationships between leadership styles and voluntary work behaviors of employees among selected banks in Ghana. Specifically, the objectives was to determine the extent to which leadership styles (transformational and transactional) predict employees‟ voluntary work behaviors (OCB and CWB); to examine the mediating effect of leaders‟ emotional intelligence on the leadership styles and voluntary work behaviors relationships; and to investigate whether the exhibition of voluntary work behaviors varies among employees of high performing and low performing banks. The quantitative approach to research was adopted to collect data from 234 respondents. Both purposive and simple random sampling techniques were used for the selection of respondents for the study. The findings of the study revealed that even though both the transformational and transactional leadership styles significantly positively predicted the OCB of employees, transformational leadership was more significant. Also, transformational leadership was found to have a significant negative relationship with the CWB of employees whereas transactional leadership had an insignificant relationship with CWB. Additionally, both leadership styles were found to be significantly related to EI. Furthermore, only the relationship between transformational leadership and OCB was mediated by the leaders‟ EI. It was also found that employees of high performing banks did not score higher in the exhibition of OCB compared to low performing banks and employees of low performing banks were not found to score higher with respect to CWB as compared to those of high performing banks. It was however suggested that both leadership styles and more especially transformational leadership should be used in the quest to encourage employees‟ OCB. Also, the transformational leadership style is recommended when leaders want to mitigate the CWB of their employees.