Principals’ Leadership Styles and Secondary School Teachers’ Organizational Commitment in Ethiopia

Abstract

This study set out to investigate the connection between principals’ leadership styles and the organizational commitment of secondary school teachers in Ethiopia. A descriptive survey research method was applied, involving 287 teachers who were chosen through a multistage sampling procedure. Data were gathered using two established instruments: the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) developed by Bass and Avolio (1997) to assess leadership practices, and the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) by Allen and Meyer (1990) to evaluate teachers’ affective, continuance, and normative commitment. Analysis combined descriptive statistics with inferential techniques. The findings revealed that transactional leadership emerged as the dominant style among Ethiopian secondary school principals. Furthermore, both transactional and transformational leadership styles demonstrated significant positive relationships with the three dimensions of organizational commitment, while laissez-faire leadership was negatively associated with normative commitment. The study ends by highlighting the implications of these results and offering recommendations aimed at enhancing teachers’ organizational commitment.