Impact of Leadership Styles toward Employee Engagement among Malaysian Civil Defence Force

Abstract

It is a fact that organization’s success and failure heavily depend on employees and employee engagement is found as one of the important indicators to engage work force in any organization. It has been repeatedly discussed by researchers in the past years and it was established that employee engagement is affected by variation in leadership styles. Many drivers regarding employee engagement have been identified, thus making the concept of employee engagement clear and more understandable for the employer. It also impacts employee performance and wellbeing as found by the past researchers. Leadership style also play a significant role in employee engagement. Leadership style is usually associated with the engagement of an employee and became the most important driver that may create culture of employee engagement in the organization. Leadership style also helps to drive optimal level of productivity in an organization and maintain employee trust. This study aims to identify the engagement level of employees in Malaysian Civil Defense Force and its relationship with leadership style. This research used Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) as a research instrument. SPSS software package for social sciences version 22 was used to analyze the data in this study. Finding of this study shows that leadership styles have a significant impact on employee engagement especially transformational leadership has a significant relationship with employee engagement. Therefore, from the findings of this study, it is suggested for the future researchers to use the mix method in collecting data so that the findings will be more accurate and detailed and can be generalized.