The Relationship between Managers’ Level-Five Leadership Style and their Employees’ Organizational Citizenship Behavior in the Telecommunication Companies in Jordan

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between managers’ level-five leadership style and their employees’ organizational citizenship behavior in the Jordanian telecommunication companies in Jordan.

The importance of the study is to find out whether or not this style can nurture or develop the employees’ OCB and it is meaningful because it is the first to be conducted in recent years.

The role of leaders is to motivate subordinates to achieve their objectives which feed the achievement of the global organizations’ objective. Old prejudices and stereotypes, such as perceiving employees’ sole motivator or stimulator to have organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) with its attributes altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, sportsmanship and civic virtues, is the material pay back. The so called level-five leadership style qualities, as being highly capable individual, contributing, team member, competent manager, effective leader and great leader found to be motivators to make  employees behave with (OCB) . After analyzing the results, it was concluded that to nurture a culture behavior shaped with altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, sportsmanship and civic virtues, was necessary for leaders to recognize the need of adapting level-five leadership style qualities, employing the high professionalism in conducting business, but at the same time conducting the business with humanity.

Following the quantitative methods with two tailor made designed and developed study questionnaires. The two questionnaires were distributed among the three main telecom companies’ employees in Jordan to get as profoundly insight as possible when it comes first to their perceptions of their managers’ level-five leadership style with its elements “highly capable individual, contributing individual, team member, competent manager, effective leader & great leader”. The second one was designed to get the insight about how subordinates perceive their organizational citizenship behavior level with its dimensions “altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, sportsmanship and civic virtues”.

The population of this study was the headquarters of the three main Jordanian Telecom Companies and the unit of analysis was the employees who are working at the head quarters & the calculated sample was (299).

The study followed the analytical descriptive method to investigate the relationship between the independent variables and the dependant variables. Statistical tools were used to highlight the sample characteristics and to test the study hypotheses such as Cronbach Alpha, Correlation coefficient, F test, chi-square test, & the regression analysis.

The study comes up with the following findings:

• Employees are showing high level of organizational citizenship behavior especially when it comes to courtesy, altruism, civic virtues and conscientiousness.
• There is a positive relationship between managers’ level-five leadership style & employees’ (OCB).
• The study comes out with weak results for the effective leader quality. That comes obvious when we talk about setting clear objectives and motivating employees to achieve results and perform effectively.
• The result of the study shows strong results for the telecom leaders being highly capable individuals, contributing team members and competent managers.

Also the study recommended the following:

• Leaders need to settle this issue smartly and need to set their subordinates for more success.
• Managers need to take the following actions:
  • Setting SMART objectives and goals for employees in order to be able to measure the development of their achievements.
  • Managers need to set meeting on monthly bases with their employees to check on the development of the achievements.
  • HR department needs to make a follow up on managers to check whether they set SMART objectives for their employees and follow their achievement.
  • HR department needs to design training programs for managers on how to set SMART objectives for the subordinates and how to follow up on these objectives.
• Holding the responsibility of the negative results: at the end of the day it is a shared responsibility and sometimes it is the managers’ own responsibility as they are the ones who set the vision and guide the subordinates toward the achievements of their goals. So Telecom companies need to make it clear that leaders have to lead and to guide, so they hold the responsibility of any failure, not the subordinate.

Keywords: Level-Five Leadership, Citizenship, Competent, Effective, Altruism, Courtesy, Conscientiousness, Sportsmanship, Civic Virtue.