Leadership Styles and Their Impact on Employees’ Performance in Cameroon Development Corporation

Abstract

The various leadership styles play an important role in organizational productivity that enhances employee performance. It can influence someone’s behavior or attitudes. The main problem addressed by this research is the absence of strategic interventions on leadership styles in Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC) that impact employee performance. The main objective of this research is to determine how the leadership styles in the CDC impact employee performance. The exploratory case study design is used with quantitative approach to find out their relationship. The technique used is stratified sampling techniques with a sample size of 384 employees. Data collection was done using a questionnaire and was tested to determine the reliability and the three sub scales alpha value of the instrument which was found significant with more than 70. Aligning with the interactions of interviews as a primary source of data and complimented with the secondary sources, the researcher employed the content analysis approach to examine the issues of leadership styles and its impacts on employees’ performance in CDC. This helps to come out with transcriptions and examination of the participant’s diverse opinions. The standard beta coefficient, a multiple regression analysis used found that democratic leadership style has a positive and significant impact on employee performance while in contract bureaucratic leadership style has a lesser effect on employee performance and autocratic leadership styles has a negative effect on employees’ performance. The most common leadership style used in CDC is Bureaucratic Leadership style with 175 (45.6%) followed by Democratic Leadership style with 115 (29.9%) and Autocratic leadership style with 94 (24.5%). The conclusion was that two leadership styles positively impact employee performance CDC with the exemption of autocratic leadership style. Future research was suggested to include analyzing more than one organization and also to make comparative studies on various industries who are involved in the primary and tertiary sectors of the economy.
Keywords: Leadership styles, democratic, bureaucratic, autocratic leadership styles and employee performance.