Impacts of leadership style on the organizational job performance Surveying public sector organizations in Kurdistan Region

: The style of leadership is important to organizational job performance. This study intends to investigate the leading style of leadership, which has a greater impacts on organizational job performance. It also studies the relationship between four common leadership styles including democratic, autocratic, charismatic, and transformational leadership on the organizational job performance in public sector organizations. The data was collected by using quantitative methods and the result was obtained upon 90 respondents. The findings indicate a significant relationship between charismatic leadership, transformational leadership, and organizational job performance. However, democratic leadership was found to have an insignificant but positive relationship with organizational performance. Autocratic leadership is also found to have a negative and insignificant relationship with organizational job performance as employees have the least saying and leaders using coercion and enforce their decision on employees without their participation. The study also indicated that charismatic leadership has the most effective effects on organizational job performance followed by the transformational leadership style. Democratic leadership has the least contribution to organizational job performance. This study helps public sector organizations in Kurdistan Region to enhance productivity, satisfaction, and commitment of the employees that together maintain organizational job performances.


Introduction:
Leadership is described as a social phenomenon that is could be seen in every organization ad institution and almost everywhere regardless of the type of the organization.Leadership is being studied for many years as its rooted in myth and history that attracts hundreds of scholars to conduct their scholarly research (Hartog and Koopman, 2011).Leadership is a method in which individuals in which leaders influence the action of the followers to achieve a particular goal through communication and interactive means (Covey, 2007;Mullins, 1999).Several scholars defined the concept of leadership and they provide different definitions.Different styles of leadership bring about different consequences or output which directly or indirectly define the relationships and performances that occur within organizations.There is still concern about styles of leadership and the type of relationship that exists between the organization and the performance.So, several studies have been done to establish the linkage between leadership style and its impacts on the organization's overall outputs.The results of the experiments are different and complicated were given by the scholars who study the relationships.Any changes in the organization that occurs are determined by the leaders.The changes in the organization whether it's positive or negative persuade employee to attributes to the leader (Anwar & Balcioglu, 2016).However, this complicated relationship is determined by the leader's ability.Thus, the changes and transformations in the organization directed by the leader.In ‫/العذد‬ 54 ‫/ج‬ 3 : 30 / 6 / 2021 444 this case, the behavior of the leader is a matter as it can change the output of the organization.However, leadership style is not always important, or it is not the only source of change or performance in the organization.For that, the role of leadership on organizational performance should not be exaggerated, but it should be studied with other factors.Therefore, different leadership style produces different work outcome.Here, there is confusion, because, for some scholars, there is no such direct causal relationship.However, organizational performances might be characterized by the follower rather than the leaders.In the other words, leaders without a follower is not a leader, so followers are equally important in defining the relationship inside the organization.Indeed, a successful leader is the one who is accepted by the employees and gets an appropriate response from the followers.In this case, as discussed by Anwar (2016) in his study about leadership style in agriculture sector, the author believes that motivation could be controversial as differentiation and different leadership style can have different influence on the employees (Anwar, 2016).Hersey and Blanchard (2007) stated that a successful leadership style mainly relies on how well it fits with employees' ability and willingness to fulfill their responsibility and carrying out their tasks.Democratic leadership might have better or negative impacts on the performance of the organization, and the same goes for other leadership styles.Also, different work environments and different locations might require a different type of leadership.In Kurdistan, there is not enough literature about the common and widespread style of leadership and how it impacts on organizational performances.There are also some doubts and confusion about the effects and motivations that leaders in public sector organizations pose on their employees.It is still not clear; the general workforce in the Kurdistan region prefers strict types of leadership style or more flexible types of leadership.This current study tries to investigate the most desirable leadership style among the employees of public organizations in the Kurdistan Region.It also intends to study the relationships between leadership styles and organizational job performance.Previous Studies: The types of leadership are important when studying organizational performance and many scholars have studied this topic and covered different styles.Scholars have provided enriched literature on the relationship between leadership styles and organizational performances in ‫/العذد‬ 54 ‫/ج‬ 3 : 30 / 6 / 2021 444 many aspects.Scholars usually use leadership style as an independent variable; however, performance has been treated as a dependent variable.For the firms, performance and increasing productivity is the key to their success (Prabhu et al. 2020).Thus, employees through effective leadership may obtain that ambitious.The performance in its broader meaning is explained and measured by Armstrong (2010).The author measured organizational performance through employees or organization functions, accomplishment, execution, and working out of anything undertaken or ordered.Thus, organizations are profoundly impacted by the leadership style (Walumbwa et al. 2011).In the real sense, the main objective of any organization is to achieve certain goals that are designed to be fulfilled.To achieve such goals, human resources and individual capabilities are needed within organizations and should be operationalized by someone known as a leader or a boss.In this case, the leader has a great role in utilizing human resources existed within the organization through their motivation and effects in directing individuals (Abdullah & Othman, 2019).Kotter (1996) show that leaders are affecting employees toward goals and make them informing them using motivational way.
The leader by motivating employees comprehends the position, maintains, and fulfils organizational goals.Thus, employees will be motivated as they are satisfied towards their management and they tasks accordingly and strive to fulfill overall organization objectives.Different styles of leadership bring about different values that pose direct or indirect effects on the behaviors and attitudes of employees at the workplace.Thus, according to Ogbonna and Harris (2000) leadership is associated with the performance of the employees at the workplace.For that, the concrete relationship between leadership styles and organizational performances has become an academic subject and attracted researchers to study more deeply.Here, scholars like Maritz (1995) studied the relationship between leadership behavior and employees' performances.They claimed that the effectiveness of any group of employees considerably relies on the quality and style of leadership.Also, they have demonstrated that the effectiveness of leadership behavior develops and enhances employees' desires which consequently improves their work style and general behaviors.
In another study by Cummings and Schwab (1973) leadership is found to be the most examined variable that has tremendous effects on the ‫/العذد‬ 54 ‫/ج‬ 3 : 30 / 6 / 2021 444 employees' job performances.Several other studies investigated the relationship between employees' performances and leadership styles from different countries.For instance, Kirkpatrick and Locke (1996) collected almost 35 research and identified that there is a positive relationship between leadership style and organizational performances.Similarly, in the recent study by Shahab and Nisa (2014), it has been found that leadership poses a positive significant impact on the organizational job performances.That relationship as Gul et al. (2012) argued will play a considerable role to ensure the performance of individual workers at the workplace.

Theoretical analysis and hypothesis development:
The following section concerning the research framework discusses theories relating to the four common types of leadership styles including democratic, autocratic, charismatic, and transformational leadership.This section also explains how hypothesis used in this study developed.Democratic Leadership: While the democratic process tends to focus on group equality and the free flow of ideas, the group leader is still there to offer guidance and control.The democratic leader has the responsibility to decide who is in the group and who can contribute to the decisions that are made.It's more participators and more people can involve in the decisionmaking process which makes employees more satisfied with their job (Choi, 2007).Scholars have demonstrated that the democratic style of leadership is the most effective and pursues greater productivity, more contributions from followers, and a higher morality of the group (Ganeshkumar, Prabhu, Abdullah, 2019).
Wagner (1997), at the University of Maryland, offers an expanded definition of democratic leadership by adding participatory to the equation.Participatory leadership as a form of democratic leadership is explained by Wagner et al (1997) as a synonym to democratic leadership as "any shared power agreement in which influence in the workplace is shared between individuals who would otherwise be hierarchically unequal." As followers are motivated to share their views, democratic leadership can result to offer more solutions to problems in a creative way.Group members also feel more involved and committed to the projects, so they are more likely to worry about the results.Research on leadership styles has also shown that democratic leadership leads to greater productivity among group members.Furthermore, Hackman and Johnson ‫/العذد‬ 54 ‫/ج‬ 3 : 30 / 6 / 2021 440 (1996) believe that democratic leadership importantly relates to the employees' productivity, job, satisfaction, commitment, and involvement of the employees.Relationships are based on mutual trust between work and administration.Employees in such kind of situation are less likely to be absent but will have a greater commitment to performance.Even though democratic leadership is seen to be the most effective style of leadership, but it still has some disadvantages.When the situation is not clear or time is the matter, democratic leadership may lead to miscommunication and wasting.In certain cases, followers may not have the knowledge or experience to effectively contribute to the decisionmaking process.Democratic leadership can also make team members feel that their opinions and ideas are not taken into consideration, which reduces employees' morale.Based on the above literature, the following hypothesis could be developed: H1: The Democratic leadership style has a significant relationship with organizational job performances.Autocratic Leadership: The focus of autocratic leadership is on the employees' command and control.Leaders are lack direction and harsh in which employees must follow orders without any inclusion.The leadership in this style is centralized and the authority is concentrated in the hand of one person from a different organizational hierarchy.The subordinates should not violate orders or express their concern; otherwise, there is a possibility to face harsh responses.In other words, the management is in control of the leader and all authorities emanated from a leader and ends with the leader (Ram, 2001; Melling & Little, 2004).
Autocratic leadership is not always negative due to its coercive nature, but some researchers have found autocratic leadership as a key to solve organizational problems.Some authors have found that the sole solution to the complicated dilemma conflict is to apply coercive and strict means of controlling (Vugt et al., 2003).This is also important to avoid individual selfishness and eradicated the ruthless competition between individual members as argued by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan.However, controlling group members and avoiding conflict by force is not always the perfect choice; Therefore, if such controlling takes a long time, it causes dissatisfaction and force group members to find an alternative.In ‫/العذد‬ 54 ‫/ج‬ 3 : 30 / 6 / 2021 449 such cases, an employee can leave the organization and create gaps that widen the gaps and disagreement.
Employees' instability does not have a positive impact on the organizational performance and kills the sense of belonging and ownership in the organizations.Group stability is very important to the performance of employees in many tasks.It will raise the level of individual commitment towards the vision of the organization which motivating them to invest in their organizations (Vugt et al., 2003).The second importance of employee stability as discussed by Moreland and Levine (1982) is to build transitive memory and lastly to perform the task with a minimum individual contribution.The type of leadership matters here to maintain the stability and viability of the employees.Autocratic leadership might be ineffective to preserve employees' commitment which can be guaranteed through motivation and inspiration.Thus, democratic participatory leadership is more viable because members of the organization can participate in the decision-making process.It is equally important because employees can share their views and express their concerns on different issues relating to the organization.
It also argued that the goal of autocratic leadership is to whatever it feels necessary to assure the common good.To do so, the leader decides what's good, what needs to be done, who should be heard, and who should involve (Vugt et al., 2003).The decision in autocratic leadership is concentrated in the hand of one person and decisions are made accordingly.Therefore, organizational behavior and employees' expectation have changed due to the development of technology.Autocratic leadership in most cases causes dissatisfaction and makes employees uncomfortable due to the existence of authoritarian behavior of the leader.This could be true even employees know that the leader practices his leadership style to train and empower inexperienced employees or to assure quality control (Akor, 2014).More clearly, employees sometimes know the intention of the leader at the workplace, but since authoritarian exists, they feel uncomfortable and destabilize their performance.
Autocratic leadership is effective when there is little time to decide.In such cases, the most experienced individual that becomes a leader decides on behalf of group members.Since autocratic leaders do not include others in their decision, the process becomes very quick; especially 444 it's important when there an emergency or need to make an emergency decision.Autocratic leadership can also be effective to complete tasks in organizations where individuals are not motivated to do so.Some organizations have a low-quality employee in which requires close attention and monitoring to complete their tasks.Here, autocratic leadership prevents employees from excessive time consuming and relaxing in which improves employees' efficiency and performance within their organizations.Upon the above discussion the following hypothesis could be developed: H2: The autocratic leadership style has a significant relationship with organizational job performances.Charismatic leadership style: The structure of charismatic leadership relies on strong emotion from followers not a leader for devotion and action.So, the mediate relationship between charisma and its outcome produces charismatic leadership.The nature of charismatic leadership associates with positive emotions that leaders transfer to their followers (Damen et al, 2008).Emotion could be felt differently and there is no consistent type of emotion.For leaders to be charismatic, emotion becomes the center of the relationship.Sometimes creating such emotions could be through coercive means or using threats to gain admiration from followers, or sharing love, pride, and compassion.These are common methods to create emotion and motivating followers.The modern example of emotion could be found in Steve Jobs' leadership as explained by ().Steve Jobs shamed those who did not perform at their workplace.Shaming may have the same influence on employees' performance as praise (Isaacson, 2011) Charismatic leadership is defined by Chelladurai (2011) as the procedure that the leader impacts on the assumption and organizational change in which establishes a friendly environment that increases employees' commitment towards organization vision, mission, and values.The leader in this type of leadership incites love and feeling in the heart of employees and the process becomes valuable for them.The valued action of employees in this case creates an emotional relationship in which motivates employees to achieve organizational goals.Charismatic leadership more concentrates on the existing relationship between followers and the leader.The leadership style becomes charismatic when ‫/العذد‬ 54 ‫/ج‬ 3 : 30 / 6 / 2021 442 the leader incites organizational goals to the followers; in return, followers accept the vision as their own (Cacioppe, 1997).
Charismatic leaders have unique characteristics including idealized traits, effects, stimulating motivation, rational incentives, and followers' individualized thoughts.The first characteristic which is idealized traits refers to the understanding of followers that believe their leader is charisma.The idealized effects, on the other hand, assists leader to value his leadership, confident and trust in followers which influence their action and obedience.Charismatic leaders also stimulating motivation that leads to the implementation of the proposed plan.The rational incentive characteristic of leadership introduces followers' new ways to solve a problem.It stimulates analyzing skills with positive thinking as rational becomes a motive in the management process.Lastly, the individualized thought emerges as leaders giving assignment and teaches followers on individual roots.The following hypothesis has been developed considering scholarly arguments on charismatic leadership and its impacts on organizational job performance: H3: The charismatic leadership style has a significant relationship with organizational job performances.

Transformational Leadership and Organizational Performances:
The relationship between transformational leadership and organizational performance has been studied by many scholars (Blake & Mouton, 1964).İşcan, Ersarı & Naktiyok (2014) described transformational leadership as the style of leadership that leader oversees the future of the organization, endeavor towards the improvement of the employees' self-esteem by supporting them to know about their potentials and communicates the missions of the organization with employees to fulfill and satisfy their needs.Moreover, Obiwuru et al (2011) argue that transformational leadership encourages followers to understand the importance of their tasks and give up on their self-interest for the sake of the organization through the achievement of better needs.The author also argues that this type of leadership style elevates the leader and the followers.
What differentiates transformational leadership from other types of leadership is leaders morally inspiring their followers.It is also argued that the transformational leadership style is better than other types of leadership as leaders should have the ability to respond to the demands of followers ‫/العذد‬ 54 ‫/ج‬ 3 : 30 / 6 / 2021 444 from different situations.To fulfill this goal of transformational leadership is for leaders to be flexible and able to study events, environments.This type of leadership as discussed by Bass (1999) it lacks immediate selfinterest but it is visionary, inspirational, and symbolic that concentrates on employees' attention on employees' strategic goals motivates employees towards a higher purpose.Transformational leadership found to have a positive and significant relationship with the improvement of organizational performances (Waldman et al., 2001).
The nature of the transformational leadership style is the leader adopts his style to the actual circumstances.Transformational leadership especially very effective for the uncertain environment and helps to achieve organizational competitive advantage and improves performance (Nemanich & Keller, 2007).In this style of leadership, the leaders act in a way that motivates employees' level of performance, innovation, critical thinking which results in the performance of the organizations and innovation.Transformational Leadership also instills a sense of motivation in employees and provides an innovative environment and teamwork.Thus, as found by (Kanter, 1983), this type of leadership positively impacts organizational innovation.To investigate whether transformational leadership has impacts on organizational job performance, the following hypothesis could be developed: H4: The transformational leadership style has a significant relationship with organizational job performances.Data Methods: The data was collected using survey questionnaires.The research questions were personally distributed.Over 15 days was used to fully collect the data.The target population in this study is employees in public sector organizations.The sample size on the other hand which is the number of units that are required to get accurate findings (Fink, 2002).Gay and Diehl (1992) indicate that selecting an appropriate number of the sample population is essential to obtain the proper outcome.Thus, over 120 questionnaires were distributed.Out of this number, 103 questionnaires were returned.However, some of the respondents did not fill up the questions properly, so only 90 questionnaires were used for the final analysis.The designed questionnaire was based on the research framework as shown in  1, the male participants are majority since the number of male ration in public sector organizations in Kurdistan region is higher comparing to female.Regarding the age distribution of the the age of majority of the respondents are ranged between 26 to 45 which is already expected as they are dominating the public sector organization; however, the employees with 45 years and above only comprising 15.6% in this study with frequency of 14. Lastly, the education background of the respondents shows the smaller image of public sector organization in terms of education qualification.As shown below respondents are diverse, but those who hold bachelor degree are more dominant comparing to other certificates.However, the data was also distributed at the Ministry of Higher education; Thus, a good portion of the employees hold higher education certificate with almost 18% which is high if comparing to real distribution of employee in terms of education level.In total 90 respondents only 8 of them holds high school certificate.The bellow table demonstrate the abovementioned demographic distributions of the respondents.(2) Determines whether the model fits and the extent to which variances are explained by the dependent variable; thus, the model has been evaluated and the result shows that "R" is 0.0768.Thus, the value of "r" here is 0.768 which indicates that the variances independent variable explained by the dependent variable.On the other hand, the below table shows the value of R Square is 0.589 which means democratic, autocratic, transformational, and charismatic leadership explains 56.9 percent of the variability of the employee's job performance.

444
The result of the hypothesis indicates that charismatic leadership with a Beta Coefficient value of 0.488 has a positive significant relationship with organizational job performances and that means the third hypothesis is accepted as p=.000; 000<.05(accepted).Furthermore, the results show that transformational leadership has a positive significant relationship with organizational job performances with a Beta Coefficient of 0.314 and a significant value of p=.000; 000<.05.This indicates the approval of H4.The relationship between democratic leadership and organizational job performances was also tested and the result shows a positive but not significant relationship between democratic leadership and organizational job performances as p=.000; 000>.05 and Beta Coefficient value of 0.025 which indicates the rejection of H1.However, the relationship between autocratic leadership and organizational job satisfaction is not supported as the Beta Coefficient value is -0.001 and it is negative and insignificant as p=.000; 000>.05.Thus, indicated that H2 is rejected.
Table ( 444 is negatively contributing to the performance of the organization.These findings are consistent with what Akor (2014) found in his study that believes employees are excluded and their views are not valued.Thus, employees will be demotivated and impact their organizational productivity.The autocratic leadership style also poses a greater negative effect on the well-being of the employees.Other findings by Edem (1998) and Akor (2014) also support this current result.They argue that leaders in this style of leadership do not communicate with their subordinates and enforcing tasks on employees.The outcome of this miscommunication causes dissatisfaction and stress, as they cannot communicate their concern with their leaders.Therefore, Transformational leadership has the secondlargest contribution in the organizational job performances among employees in Kurdistan with a Beta Coefficient of 0.314.These findings are in line with other scholars (Bass & Jung, 1995; Dumdum, Lowe, and Avolio, 2002) who found a positive significant correlation between transformational leadership and organizational efficiency.The same findings were obtained in the study of İşcan, Ersarı & Naktiyok (2014) who found that transformational leadership has a significant positive impact on innovation which is a key indicator of organizational performance.
Surpassingly, democratic leadership has the least contribution to organizational job performance.This could be related to the uncertainty of the organizations in which requires the leader to adapt to the situation.The nature of public as well as private organizations in the Kurdistan Region is uncertain both economically and politically.The external factors have a strong influence on their job performance.Thus, democratic leadership may not be very effective in such an uncertain environment.However, the current study indicates that charismatic leadership is the most desirable style of leadership among employees in the Kurdistan Region.This result contradicts the finding by Hazhar et al., (2020), Wahab, Rahmat, Yousof, and Mohammed (2016) who found that transformational leadership is the most preferable and effective style of leadership concerning organizational performance.Conclusions: This study has concluded that each style of leadership has its characteristics and can be used interchangeably depending on the existing situation; however, the most effective style of leadership as shown in this study is charismatic leadership that is based on motivation and inspiration ‫/العذد‬ 54 ‫/ج‬ 3 : 30 / 6 / 2021 444 where leaders are followed due to their strong characteristics.One of the key importance of charismatic leadership is the leader can rule even when he is not physically involved in the process, but his impact is beyond the physical presence of the leader which results in sustainable organizational job performance.It can help employees to feel their presence and role within an organization through leadership motivation.It also prevents turmoil and conflicts between employees.Employees will be motivated to better perform their tasks and feel ownership not just as a member of the organization.The study also concludes that the leader must apply a leadership style depending on the circumstances, changing it, if necessary, or using combinations in prudent cases.This kind of character is found in transformational leadership that leaders adapt themselves to the situation and apply what services the organization.The study does not fully support the application of democratic leadership in organizations.The democratic leadership which mainly concentrates on employee participation may not always support organizational job performance in the case of Kurdistan due to the instability of the organizations.Finally, autocratic leadership style has an insignificant and reverse impact on organizational job performance as leaders enforce their decision without communicating with employees.The sense of exclusion and avoidance is very high in this style of leadership.Recommendations for future studies: Several other gaps need to be studied when it comes to leadership.Even though several studies have been conducted on the topic of leadership, but it's very important to study the impacts of leadership on the quality of products.Most research focuses on performance, but studying the quality of the product will be an interesting topic for research.Also, the style of leadership in certain areas like education is important to be studied to identify the most preferable style of leadership for teaching staff as well as students in academic institutions.

References:
1. Abdullah, Nabaz Nawzad, and Masayu Binti Othman, Examining the effects of intellectual capital on the performance of Malaysian food and beverage small and medium-sized enterprises, Technology (IJCIET) Figure (1): Research FrameworkResults and Discussion: The study first tested the demographic distribution of the respondents.As shown in Table1, the male participants are majority since the number of male ration in public sector organizations in Kurdistan region is higher comparing to female.Regarding the age distribution of the the age of majority of the respondents are ranged between 26 to 45 which is already expected as they are dominating the public sector organization; however, the employees with 45 years and above only comprising 15.6% in this study with frequency of 14. Lastly, the education background of the respondents shows the smaller image of public sector organization in terms of education qualification.As shown below respondents are diverse, but those who hold bachelor degree are more dominant comparing to other certificates.However, the data was also distributed at the Ministry of Higher education; Thus, a good portion of the employees hold higher education certificate with almost 18% which is high if comparing to real distribution of employee in terms of education level.In total 90 respondents only 8 of them holds high school certificate.The bellow table demonstrate the abovementioned demographic distributions of the respondents.Table (1): Demographic distribution of the respondents Items Frequency Percentage (%) GENDER Male 61 67.8 Female 29 32.2Total 90 100.0

Table (
To measure the statistical significance of multiple regression, this study looks for ANOVA as explained in the below table.The results indicate that predictors have significantly predicted employees' job performance, F(90)= 30.467, p <0.005 and that indicates that the model well fits the data and the sig value reaches the statistically significant level.