Leadership approach and employee performance in Uganda public service: case study inspectorate of government

Abstract

Administration in the Ugandan Public service is highly hierarchical in nature and many of its shortcomings have been in the past blamed on the various layers of bureaucracy therein whereas little attention has been paid to the leadership approach required to make such structures efficient (Ladu, 2014). This study sought to establish the influence of the leadership approach that are currently practiced in the Uganda Public Service with emphasis on how leaders make decision, control authority and relate with their subordinates as perceived by their subordinates. The Inspectorate of Government was used as the case study for this research. The study was premised on the behavioral and contingency theories of leadership and it adopted a case study research design to attain findings that were relevant to the research objectives. A self-administered questionnaire was used to obtain responses from the 131 individuals all technical employees of the Inspectorate of Government and the results obtained from these responses were analyzed quantitatively. From the data collected and analyzed, it was found that at the Inspectorate of Government, the leaders centralize authority, have little concern for their subordinates and that they use involve their subordinates in the decision making processes. It was also found that there was a significant but weak positive relationship between employee performance and the leader’s control of authority and social relationship with subordinates while there was a strong positive relationship between employee performance and the leader’s decision making. It was recommended that leaders in the public service should exercise participatory decision making, show social concern for the people that they lead and also to exercise more delegation as opposed to centralized control of authority.