Work Supervisors’ Leadership Styles and Labourers Performance of Northern Province, Sri Lanka

Leadership style is one of the strategies to influence the performance of the employees of the organization. Main Objective of this research is to identify the impact of work supervisors' leadership styles on Road Maintenance labourers' performance in the Road development Authority, Northern Province. However, a part of the aims is to introduce the best leadership approach to increase the performance of RDA Road Maintenance Labourers working in the field. The research used mixed method approach with descriptive and inferential method to determine the effect of leadership styles on employee performance. The full range leadership styles of transformational, transactional, laissez faire and autocratic (independent variables) were considered with labourers performance (dependent variable). The sample population of the study is comprised of the 200 Road Maintenance labourers of the Northern province RDA. Simple random sampling techniques were used in this research. Two part of questionnaires were used to collect data on profile of sample and variables. SPSS 25 software was used to calculate inferential analysis of correlation and regression to test the hypothesis. The results from both analyses show that Transactional and Transformational leadership styles significantly impact on Road Maintenance labourers performance at the level of 0.05 (P-0.044) and 0.01(P-0.006) respectively effect on employee performance. Overall leadership styles are impact on labourers performance at the level of 0.01 level (0.008). From the results, transformational and transactional leadership have greater effects on labourers' performance. It is recommended therefore that Transformational and transactional leaderships of work supervisors are the most effective leadership styles which are recommended for the RDA management to follow this HR practice by their work supervisors in order to increase the performance of RDA labourers.