Leadership behaviour and employee morale within the Department of Agriculture

Abstract

The study of leadership is one of those disciplines that invoke fierce debate among scholars and at the centre of the leadership debate lies the many approaches to the discipline that are employed by scholars and these approaches have led to different definitions of the discipline such as the trait theory of leadership, the behavioural theory of leadership and the contingent theory of leadership. This study was undertaken for two main reasons. Firstly, to investigate the leadership behaviour of deputy directors of the Department of Agriculture and secondly, to establish how those leadership behaviour of deputy directors impacted on the employee morale of their subordinates. The study was conducted within the public administration environment and it was conducted using the leadership behaviour theory whose main assumption is that leadership is a relationship between the leader and the followers and as such, the behaviour of the leader has direct impact on the morale of the followers. The key leadership behaviour that were used for the study came from the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) survey instrument that was developed by Kouzes and Posner (2002) and five key factors were identified as central to the study of leadership behaviour for the purpose of this study. Firstly, leaders are expected to act exemplary (model the way) by ensuring that what they say is what they do. Secondly, leaders are expected to inspire a shared vision so that their followers are able to assimilate the vision being pursued. Thirdly, leaders are expected to challenge the existing institutional processes and systems so that all resources can be directed towards the realisation of the new vision. Fourthly, leaders are expected to enable their followers to act by creating an environment that is conducive to effective service delivery and fifthly, leaders are expected to encourage their followers to endure where challenges seem overwhelming so that followers should not be discouraged and give up. Since the study was conducted within the public administration environment, its main purpose was to discover how frequently do deputy directors engage in those five factors. The study yielded mixed results where in some of the factors, deputy directors engaged frequently whereas in the other factors, they had infrequent engagement. The participants to this study were grouped into three categories: deputy directors (as leaders being evaluated), and directors and subordinates (as observers). The study used the Likert scale where the data was interpreted by means of graphs.