A study of the relationship between leadership styles and job satisfaction among executive staffs at Yayasan Sarawak, Kuching/ Annasyah Hajemi

Organizational success is very often influenced by the effectiveness of a leader and employees’ job satisfaction. In order to become an effective leader, the leader must be capable of motivating the workers. The main purpose of this thesis is to study the relationship between leadership styles and job satisfaction. Two leadership styles used in this study are transactional and transformational leadership. Transformational leadership is the type of leader that seek to transform; they motivate and enable workers to achieve organization's goals by engaging higher beliefs and moral values. Compare to transactional leadership, they work within existing organizational culture, and they motivate and enable employees to achieve organization goals by using reward and
punishment. These leadership styles are combined with job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is the level of gratification employees feel about their work, which can
affect job performance. A questionnaire was used for the purpose of data collection. 65 sets of questionnaires sent to the respondents with the return rate of 100%. The study presents the following three research findings. First, there is a significant relationship between transformational leadership and job satisfaction (r = .648, p < 0.01). Second, there is a significant relationship between transactional leadership and job satisfaction but the correlation value is lower compared to transformational leadership (r = .632, p < 0.01). Third, after running the regression analysis, it is shown that transformational leadership value is higher with β value of .404 which makes it the most dominant leadership style. There are a few recommendations that have been suggested in order to improve the shortage of this study.