| The purpose of this study was to determine to what extend does managers' leadership style impact employee engagement levels. The research foundation included the model of transactional and transformational leadership styles and their impact on employee engagement based on Transformational Leadership Development: Manual for the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire by Bass and Avolio (1990) on transactional/transformational leadership and Q12RTM Meta-analysis by Harter, Schmidt, Killham, and Asplund (2006) on employee engagement. It was the intention of this study to investigate this phenomenon with additional empirical data collected from a manufacturing setting. Study results confirm that there was a direct positive relationship between transformational leadership style and overall employee engagement. Study results also confirm that there was a direct positive association between the transformational leadership style and the management support and teamwork sub dimensions of engagement. Study results were inconclusive to measure a relationship between the transactional leadership style and employee engagement. These results were in aligned with recent reported research, such as The Relationships Between Leadership Styles and Employee Engagement by Metzler (2006), The Relationship of Self-efficacy, Perceptions of Supervisor Leadership Styles and Blue-collar Employee Engagement by Lockwood (2008), and Measuring and Managing Employee Work Engagement: A Review of the Research and Business Literature by Attridge (2009). This study addressed the reported literature gap by the performance of the study in the manufacturing setting and the consideration of the four engagement sub dimensions. |
