EMPLOYEES’ ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT AND THEIR PERCEPTION OF SUPERVISORS’ RELATIONSORIENTED AND TASK-ORIENTED LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORS

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between employees’
perceptions of their immediate supervisors’ relations-oriented and task-orientedleadership
behaviors and different types of organizational commitment.
Bass & Avolio's (1995) Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ Form 5X) was used
to measure relations-orientedand task-orientedleadership behaviors. Meyer & Allen’s (1997)
Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) was used to measure organizational
commitment.
Participants in the research included 361 employees who worked for the city of
Charlottesville, Virginia. These employees were located in eight departments that varied in the
area of technical functioning, size, and academic levels.
Factor analyses, with principal component extraction and varimax rotation, were
performed to determine how the MLQ Form 5X items would load onto a 2-factor model of
relations-orientedand task-orientedleadership behaviors. The task-orienteditems of contingent
reward loaded with the relations-orienteditems, and the non-leadershipitems of laissez-faire
loaded with the task-orienteditems. These findings resulted in an arrangement of relationsoriented and task-orientedsubscales that was different than the arrangement proposed by Bass &
Avolio (1995).
Correlations for the MLQ Form 5X revealed multicollinearity among all the relationsorientedsubscales and two of the task-orientedsubscales, preventing any interpretations about
the amount of variance that any particular type of relations-orientedor task-orientedleadership
behavior might explain in organizational commitment. Factor scores were used to perform
regressions and investigate the amount of variance relations-orientedleadership behaviors and
task-orientedleadership behaviors explained in organizational commitment. Relations-orientedleadership behaviors explained the greatest amount of variance in
affective commitment, somewhat less variance in normative commitment, and no variance in
continuance commitment. The results for task-orientedleadership behaviors revealed the same
pattern of relationships with the different types of organizational commitment, only weaker.

Keywords: Leadership, Relations-Oriented, Task-Oriented, Commitment