Leadership Styles and Employees’ Performance: Focus on Taraba State University Jalingo

The study explored the influence of leadership styles on employees’ performance in Taraba State university Jalingo. Two specific objectives with corresponding research questions and hypotheses guided the study. It was a descriptive survey research design involving 346 sample size using Taro Yamane formula from 2,564 target population for the study. 103 academic staff and 243 non-academic staff participated while 25 departments and 8 leadership responsibility offices were selected for the study. Self-developed instrument tagged “Leadership Style and Employees Job Performance Questionnaire (LSEJPQ)” was used for data collection. The questionnaire was given face and content validity in terms of scope of coverage, content relevance, ambiguity and vagueness of expression. A pilot study was conducted on 40 respondents and Split-Half was used to generate data while Cronbach’s Alpha analysis was used to generate reliability coefficient of .834. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions and inferential statistics of regression analysis was used for testing the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed that laisses-faire and transformational leadership styles significantly influence on employees’ job performance in the study area. Based on the findings, it was recommended that the Taraba State University leaders ranging from the office of Head of Departments to Directors should properly manage tendencies of laissez faire approach at their domains as it can demoralize creativity among their staff; and it is expected that the leadership of Taraba State University Jalingo should prioritize transformational leadership style being demonstrated by the Vice Chancellor in person of Prof. Sunday Paul Bako who has technically transformed the university community from low profile to high profile university in Nigeria. Based on the findings of the study, it was concluded that the leadership styles significantly influence on employees’ job performance in Taraba State University Jalingo.