The effect of leadership style towards employee's job satisfaction

Employees are considered to be one of the valuable assets in organizations. Hence, it is vital to increase and maintain their job satisfaction in return for productive outcomes. There were numerous empirical studies documented for leadership style and employee’s job satisfaction that portrayed the cruciality of both variables to be in line with one another as it will affect organizational performance. Although leadership style and job satisfaction had been studied broadly, but there was still lack of insight related to this relationship specifically in the context of retail industry. Hence, the aims of this study were to determine the relationship between leadership styles and retail employee’s job satisfaction. A convenience sampling technique was used for data collection where questionnaires was conveniently distributed to several retail store in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. There were a total of 238 retail employees responded and gave their feedback for this study. Furthermore, distributed questionnaires contained two sets of instruments namely, Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) to measure both transformational and transactional leadership style, as well as Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) to measure employee’s job satisfaction. Descriptive analysis were used for respondent’s profile as according to their gender, educational level, income level and years or service. The relationship between leadership style and job satisfaction were determined using the Pearson Correlation analysis, whilst multiple regression were used to examine whether leadership style influence job satisfaction. As a result, there is a significant relationship between transformational and transactional leadership styles on job satisfaction. Surprisingly, the result also indicates that only transformational leadership become a predictor that influence job satisfaction but not for transactional leadership. Hopefully, the current study can provide more knowledge on leadership and job satisfaction specifically done in retail industry setting.