THE EFFECT OF LEADERSHIP ON EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY

1.1         Background to the Study

The importance of leadership in an organization cannot be overemphasized. Leadership is a major element that determines successful and unsuccessful organizations. it play certain role in offering direction and purpose towards achieving goals of the organizations. It is also an important element in the social relationship of group at work. Leadership is the main factor that determines and shapes group behavior. When it is correctly applied, each employee enjoys a feeling of strong commitment towards achieving organizational goal. Regardless of equality of its members, every group will tend to have a system in which it will have a leader. However, organizational goals can never be achieved without proper leadership in place. It is important to note that the effective performance of an individual employee is a function of both his personal characteristics and the individual‟s environment. A careful consideration of knowledge, skills, experience, attitude and motivation of an employee enhances maximum productivity on job. since leadership deals with human resources / element, it provides the basis for effective utilization of material resources in organization through individual skills, knowledge and ability.

Leadership can simply be defined as a process of influencing the activities of an individual or a group towards the attainment of set goals. Leadership is the life wire of an organization. An effective leader does most if not all the following challenges the processes search out challenging opportunities, task risks, and learn from mistakes, inspires others to come together and agree to a future direction or goal, create a shared vision by thinking about the future having a strong positive vision, and encouraging others to participate.

Kouzes (2002) stated that „leadership is not a place, it‟s not a position, and it‟s not a secret code that can‟t be deciphered by ordinary people. Leadership is an observable set of skills and abilities. Of course some people are better at it of others. McGregor put it clear that there is close relationship between leader‟s expectations is high, productivity is likely to be high.

Leadership behavior plays very important roles in enhancing employee job satisfaction, work motivation and in work performance in recognition of this fact, tremendous effort and resources have been expended, with varying degrees of success, to identify and develop personnel who will occupy the positions of leadership needed to meet present and future organizational requirements. Good leadership behavior accelerates the development of most organization. It therefore plays a critical role in the performance of organization. For employees to accomplish their works, managers must encourage individual who report because of this for effective and efficient organizations leadership, the human factor must be critically looked out from the employee productivity.

On the other hands, employee productivity is an important building block of an organization and factor which lay the foundation for high performance must be analyzed by the organizations. Since every organization cannot progress by depending on one or two individual‟s efforts, it is a collective effort of all members of the organization. Productivity is a major multidimensional construct aimed to achieve results and has a strong link to strategic goals of an organization (Mwita, 2000).

1.2         Statement of the Problem

One of the problems is the inflexibility of the leadership style by most of the organization managers; they fail to adjust their style of leading to the changing situations and business environment. Another problem is close to the first. Manager‟s failures to consider the prevailing situation when leading their subordinate. They fail to allow the situation dictate the particular style of leadership to adopt. Also, the problem of absence of an effective line of communication between the managers and their employees. The communication gap between leaders and their subordinates poses a big problem for several organizations as effective leadership is predicted on communication pattern of both the managers and their subjects. Lastly, leaders lack managerial experience in ensuring that workers are motivated, the absences of motivation contributes to the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of workers.