Leadership styles and its relationship with subordinates' self-esteem

Article history: Received April 28, 2012 Accepted 22 July 2012 Available online July 26 2012 Leadership plays an essential role in managing different organizations. These days, different organizations attempt to resolve any existing conflicts through adapting an appropriate leadership strategy. During the past few years, there are increasing interests in examining the relationship between management style and self-esteem. The proposed study of this paper performs an empirical study to find the relationship between leadership style and self-esteem. The proposed study distributed a questionnaire among 80 managers and 150 regular employees of an organization in Iran. We have used Pearson correlation test, t-student and Freedman tests to verify the relationship between leadership style and self-esteem. The investigation of this survey considers four groups of leadership style including autocratic-charity, autocraticexploitation, management consulting and participative and their effects on self-esteem. The results of our survey indicate that there is a positive and strong relationship between participative leadership management style and self-esteem. The results also indicate that there is strong relationship between educational background and self-esteem. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Leadership style is one of the most important research areas among professional managers and any change in leadership style can substantially impact the success of business units.There are various methods to handle any existing conflict in organizations using different kinds of leadership style.Menguc and Auh (2008) reported the results of the relevance of nonlinear impacts in the context of how firms might improve their market orientation and performance.In fact, when it comes to manage various people from various nationalities, leadership style becomes very important.Ayoko and Callan (2010) investigated the impact of various leadership behaviors on outcomes in 97 teams.More specifically, they implemented the models applied from investigations of transformational leadership and emotional leadership to investigate the impact of specific features of team leader style in assessing team performance, as well as impacting social outcomes for team members.According to Ayoko and Callan (2010), leader behaviors involved higher levels of emotional management were related to improved levels of task performance.They found that higher levels of inspiration and communication of vision by leaders were directly impacted with lower levels of bullying by team members.Generally speaking, the relationship among task/relational conflict, transformational leadership, market orientation, and performance tends to be more complicated.Mäkilouko (2004) explained how to adapt with multicultural projects in a case study of the leadership styles of Finnish projects management.Their investigation included different team members from Finnish-Chinese, Finnish-European, and Finnish-American cultural combinations.The Chinese team members were from Hong Kong with one team from Beijing, while three multicultural project leadership styles were detected where 40 out of 47 project leaders specified a solely task oriented leadership style.The same leaders also showed cultural blindness, parochialism, ethnocentrism, or ingroup favoritism.The various leaders who determined solely relationships' orientation, or both task and relationships' orientation, also specified cultural sympathy and three leadership strategies to maintain team cohesion and to prevent cross-cultural issues.It is more likely that they understood foreign cultures as a social phenomenon and could use that knowledge in leadership.
Moghaddas Pour et al. (2012) performed an empirical study to find the relationship between relationship-oriented leadership style and solution-oriented strategy as well as between leadership style and conflict management.The proposed study distributed a questionnaire among 43 managers who were in different industries in west part of Iran.Most of the people who participated in our survey were male and they were between 25 to 30 years old.The study considers relationship between leadership style and conflict management, which includes the relationship between relationship-oriented and task-oriented leaderships with avoiding conflict management strategy, solution and control based conflict managements.The results confirmed that there is only a meaningful relationship between relationship-oriented leadership with solution-based conflict management.In other words, our survey indicates that when there is a conflict, management can handle the problem using his/her relationship and find appropriate solution to resolve any possible conflict.Nauman et al. (2010) investigated the relationship of empowerment, leadership style and customer service as a measure of efficient project management in projects.Their study studied empowerment climate in less and more virtual projects.Moreover, the study studied moderating effects of degree of vitality on the relationship between empowerment and leadership style.They collected data from project management professionals working in five countries using linear regression and moderated regression analysis to analyze the proposed hypotheses.Their results described that empowerment climate had substantial impacts on concern for task, concern for people and customer service and was higher in more virtual than less virtual projects.Sadati (2012) studied the relationship between organizational culture and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) with employees' empowerment.Empowering employee's breeds success by providing a suitable framework to utilize the necessary skills in an attempt to realize organizational goals.In this paper, four dimensions of employees' empowerment including meaningfulness, choice, competence and impact are investigated.Sadati also identified four dimensions for organizational culture including adaptability, consistency, involvement and mission.He also specified five basic dimensions of OCB, which consists of altruism, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, courtesy and civic virtue.These basic dimensions of both independent and dependent variables construct the research conceptual model and the required data is gathered from the Tehran Municipality.Cummings et al. (2010) performed a comprehensive review on leadership styles and outcome patterns for nursing workforce and work environment.They studied on 34,664 titles and abstracts and, using content analysis, they grouped 64 outcomes into five categories including staff satisfaction with work, role and pay, staff relationships with work, staff health and wellbeing, work environment factors, and productivity and effectiveness.Klein et al. (2011) investigated that team leadership moderates the impacts of values diversity on team conflict.They explained moderating impacts of task-focused and person-focused leadership.They also explained task-focused leadership attenuated the diversityconflict relationship, while person-focused leadership exacerbated the diversity-conflict relationship.
Hoozée and Bruggeman (2010) investigated how collective worker participation and leadership style impact the emergence of operational improvements during the design process of a time-driven activity-based costing (ABC) accounting system in a case study setting.Their findings recommend that, for operational improvements to occur during the design process of ABC system, collective worker participation and appropriate leadership styles were indispensable.Randeree and El Faramawy (2011) investigated Islamic perspectives on conflict management within project managed environments and found that existing research had not disclosed any study that investigated empirically the Islamic viewpoint on conflict management in contemporary organizational contexts.However, they specified that conflict in Islam was inevitable and a part of human nature, and, if managed properly, could be positive and constructive.Byrne and Bradley (2007) studied how personal and national cultures affect leadership style.They explored the differences of the two components of cultures on effective leadership.When a conflict happens in a system, there are different methods for handling conflict in the system and depending leadership style.

The proposed study
In our study, 80 people, representing 34.7%, were managers and 150, representing 65.3%, people were regular employees.In terms of leadership style, Table 1 demonstrates details of statistical observations.In terms of the population of the regular employees who participated in our survey, 112 people, 74.7%, are male and the remaining 38 employees representing 25.3% of the participants are female.In terms of their educational background, Table 3 demonstrates their educational backgrounds.As we can observe from the results of Table 3, in terms of educational background, nearly half of the participants maintained a 2-year college degree, 32% of them finished high schools and 14.6% maintained a master degree.In terms of job experiences 6% had between one to five years of related job experiences, 28% maintained 6 to 10 years of job experience, 31.3% had 11 to 15 years of job experience, 21.3% had 16-20 years of job experience and 13.3% had more than 20 years of job experience.

The results
The proposed study of this paper considers the relationship between leadership style and self-esteem.We establish eight hypotheses to examine the relationship between leadership style and self-esteem.

Relationship between autocratic-charity leadership and self-esteem
The first hypothesis is associated with the relationship between autocratic-charity leadership style and self-esteem.The Pearson correlation ratio is -0.130 with P-value=0.048,which means there is meaningful and negative relationship between these two components when the level of significance is five percent.In other words, as leader becomes more autocratic, self-esteem will be reduced.

Relationship between autocratic-exploitation leadership and self-esteem
The second hypothesis is associated with the relationship between autocratic-exploitation leadership style and self-esteem.The Pearson correlation ratio is -0.070 with P-value=0.288,which means there is no meaningful relationship between these two components when the level of significance is five percent.

Relationship between management consulting leadership and self-esteem
The third hypothesis is associated with the relationship between management consulting leadership style and self-esteem.The Pearson correlation ratio is 0.043 with P-value=0.134,which means there is no meaningful relationship between these two components when the level of significance is five percent.

Relationship between participative leadership and self-esteem
The first hypothesis is associated with the relationship between participative leadership style and self-esteem.The Pearson correlation ratio is 0.186 with P-value=0.0005,which means there is a meaningful relationship between these two components when the level of significance is five percent.In other words, as employees are more participated in management there will be more self-esteem.

Freedman test
One of the primary concerns is to rank the leadership style effects on self-esteem based on Freedman test.The results of freedman test for partnership, management consulting, autocratic-charity and autocratic-exploitation are 3.41, 3.08, 2 and 1.51, respectively.In other words, partnership leadership style plays an important role on self-esteem.

Relationship between personal characteristics and self-esteem
In order to investigate the relationship between self-esteem and personal characteristics we use one-way analyses of variance and t-student.

Gender and self-esteem
The first personal characteristic is the relationship between gender and self-esteem and the results are summarized in Table 4 as follows.As we can observe from the results of Table 4, there is no meaningful relationship between gender and self-esteem when the level of significance is five percent.As we can observe from the results of Table 5, there is a meaningful relationship only between self-esteem and education when the level of significance is one percent.However, there is not any meaningful relationship between self-esteem and job experience or age.We have also performed LSD test and the results revealed that maximum self-esteem is associated with employees with 2 years of college education and the minimum self-esteem is associated with those employees who could not complete high school degree.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have studied the relationship between leadership style and self-esteem.The proposed study distributed a questionnaire among 80 managers and 150 regular employees of an organization in Iran.We have used Pearson correlation test, t-student and Freedman tests to verify the relationship between leadership style and self-esteem.The investigation of this survey considered four groups of leadership style including autocratic-charity, autocratic-exploitation, management consulting and participative and their effects on self-esteem.The results of our survey indicated that there was a positive and strong relationship between participative leadership management style and self-esteem.The results also indicated that there was strong relationship between educational background and self-esteem.

Table 1
Statistical observations for leadership style for 80 managers participated in survey

Table 4
The results of t-student associated with the relationship between gender and self-esteem