br Literature review With the increased complexity and chang

Literature review With the increased complexity and change in operations globally, leadership has been a topic of debate, but no common definition has been agreed upon. According to Jong and Hartog, (2007), leadership can be defined as a process of influencing people to get the desired outcomes. Andersen (2016) stated that leaders are the ones who stimulate, motivate, and recognize their employees in order to get work done and achieve the desired results. Leaders adopt various leadership styles in order to motivate and stimulate the employees. Lok and Crawford (2004) claimed that leadership can better predict the success or failure of an organization. This study is an effort to explore transformational, transactional and laissez faire styles of leadership and understand its impact on the attitude of employees towards their leaders and performance in the banking sector of Pakistan.
Relationship between leadership styles and performance outcomes Different leadership styles bring about different consequences, which have direct or indirect impact on the attitude and behaviors of the employees. It is evident in literature that transformational leadership behavior is positively related to outcome variables, while transactional leadership behavior is usually negatively related to the long term performance. Transformational leadership have positive influence on employee self-efficacy, motivation, creativity and organizational performance (Bronkhorst, Steijn, & Vermeeren, 2015; Bronkhorst et al., 2015; Newland, Newton, Podlog, Legg, & Tanner, 2015; Kim & Yoon, 2015; Jyoti & Bhau, 2015). On the other hand, transactional leadership is found to enhance the job satisfaction and organizational identification as compared to transformational leadership (Epitropaki & Martin, 2005; LePine, Zhang, Crawford, & Rich, 2015). Transformational leaders help individuals to adopt organizational change (Bommer, Rubin, & Baldwin, 2004). To conclude, both transformational and transactional leadership styles govern employee attitude towards their leaders, job performance and organizational productivity. The underlying assumption of Full Range Leadership (FRL) model is that leaders are perceived effective, if they the person adopt effective leadership styles. There is abundant literature to support that leaders are perceived effective when they use transformational and transactional leadership styles together. Contrary, the leaders who are passive or use laissez-faire leadership style are considered least effective and have negative impact on followers’ performance outcomes and productivity (Bass & Avolio, 1985; Yahya & Ebrahim, 2016). To examine the same relationship in Pakistani settings and support universality of the idea, the following hypothesis is developed It is evident in literature that group performance and achievement of goals is related to the leadership style employed by the leader, as it directly affects employee behavior. It leads them to exert extra effort on their jobs and perceive their leaders as effective. The literature shows that transformational leadership style has significant positive relationship with follower׳s willingness to exert extra effort (Spano-Szekely, Griffin, Clavelle, & Fitzpatrick, 2016; Yahaya & Ebrahim, 2016). This is further evident that when followers make more efforts and work more than required, it adds to their productivity that leaders to organizational performance. Likewise, the research findings of Kuchinke (1998) indicated that different leadership styles, when adopted by leaders result in different levels of employee readiness for extra efforts. As the purpose of this study is to test this relationship in Pakistani culture, the following hypothesis is developed. Previous studies reveal that leadership style affects employee׳s performance in many ways. Vries, Roe, and Taillieu (1998) explained that leadership style, which is more human oriented, tends to increase the job satisfaction among employees. Likewise, the research findings of Packard and Kauppi (1999), Yahya and Ebrahim (2016) and Spano-Szekely (2016) indicated that different leadership styles, when adopted by leaders result in different levels of job satisfaction. For instance, leaders’ support and recognition bring higher level of job satisfaction among employees. However, everything is not same across cultures (Bhagat & Steers, 2009). Based on the above discussion, the following hypothesis is developed to explore this relationship in Pakistani society.