An investigation of leadership style and organizational commitment among Saudi public employees

The purpose of this study was threefold: first, to investigate the effects of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles upon organizational commitment of employees; second, to determine the impact of employee's satisfaction with the leader and their commitment to the organization; and third, to explore the relationship between selected demographic variables and organizational commitment.;The data for this study were collected through a questionnaire administered to all MOMRA Saudi employees. The number of completed and returned questionnaires was 346, which represents a 59.4% response rate. Descriptive statistics, correlational statistics, simple and multiple regression analysis, one way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and Cronbach's alpha were used to analyze the data.;The results of this study indicated that the level of organizational commitment of MOMRA employees was relatively low. With regard to leadership styles, the results showed that the transformational leadership style had the greatest positive effect on the employee's organizational commitment, followed by the transactional leadership style, while the laissez-faire leadership style had a negative impact on employee commitment to their organization. The results also demonstrated that employee satisfaction with the leader was found to positively affect their level of organizational commitment.;In addition, the relationship between the organizational commitment of the employees and some selected demographic variables was examined. The findings indicated that age, and length of service had a significant positive effect on the level of the organizational commitment of employees. The findings also indicated that married employees were found to be more committed to their organization compared to single, divorced, or widowed employees. Education was the only variable that had a significant negative effect on the organizational commitment of employees.;Finally, the conclusions and policy implications are presented in the final chapter of this dissertation.