Police members perception of their leaders’ leadership style and its implications

The purpose of this paper is to examine transformational and transactional leader behavior influence on the leader/follower dyad with respect to organizational commitment (OC) and satisfaction with leader in military setting.

The research is quantitative, where multiple regressions assessed the hypothesized relationships between the transformational leadership, transactional leadership and laissez-faire leadership as the independent variables and the subordinates’ satisfaction with their leader, and organization commitment as the dependent variables. The sample studied includes 154 police members in two Middle East (ME) countries.

The results indicated that there were positive linear relationship between some dimensions of transformational and transaction leadership and satisfaction with leadership. There was a negative linear relationship between laissez-faire leadership and satisfaction with leader. The leaders-outcome correlations showed higher scores between transformational leadership style and OC than between transactional leadership style and OC.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability on military institutions in other countries, and/or private institutions. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further. The research includes implications for the development of a satisfaction with leaders, and development of organization commitment in military organizations in the ME.

This research fulfills an identified need to study how military organization commitment can be enabled in ME countries.