Transformational or Transactional: Leadership Style Preferences During Covid-19 Outbreak

Abstract

The role of leadership is crucial to measure and enhance employees' performance, and job satisfaction. Employee performance is directly proportional to the supervisor's behavior and their affiliations with the employees but the type of leadership style needs to be specifically evaluated aligning with the nature of employees. The purpose of applying leadership style is to extract realistic behavior of employees and their expected behavior concerning supervisors’ behavior. Meanwhile, COVID-19 has left an immense psychological impact on employees which directly affects their attitudes, behavior and makes them more apprehensive towards tasks that cause more job efforts and build additional trust. The concept of conducting this research is based upon the sampling approach restricted to the private sector. The sample size for the study consisted of 243 responses collected through a convenient sampling technique. To analyze the data regression was applied using the SEM-PLS method. The empirical findings underscored that transactional leadership style enhances employees’ motivation and it has more influence on employee performance as compared to transformational leadership because transactional leaders motivate followers to perform at higher levels, to exert greater effort, and to show more work commitment.