Leadership Dual Behaviour and Workers’ Performance: A People-Task Orientation Model

This paper investigated leadership behaviour from a duality perspective (task-orientation and people-orientation) against the background of workers’ performance. The leadership approach adopted by a leader is predetermined by situational variables and the need to maintain social affiliation with workers. While the duality appears conflicting, scholars’ prescription are also inconclusive. Hence, a hybrid of people/task orientation, social-contingency and leadership theories helped frame the research’s philosophy, literature, methodology, and model design. Forty-four leaders were purposively selected as respondents for the study anchored on distinctive parameters. The research design is descriptive, correction, and prediction. The research is survey-based. The results from statistical analysis indicate that the elements of people-orientation, task orientation, and performance were rated high by the respondents. Also, a positive significant relationship was discovered to exist between workers’ performance and the principal elements of leaders’ task-orientation and people-orientation. The results further show that workers’ performance is predicative of leaders’ practice and encouragement of joint decision-making (people-orientation). Hence, leadership (task/people orientation) to workers’ performance was meaningless until it’s able to eliminate disconnection and create a convergence between followers and leaders in decision-making. The results hence reaffirmed social-situational model to leadership behaviour. It was therefore prescribed that what works in a specific organization, is what that organization institutionalized as leadership behaviour instead of one-size-fits-all.