Ideology, Leaders and Employee Behaviour: An Integration of Transformational Leadership Theory

Myriad of literature and studies on ideology articulate it as a concept and theory elaborating on its formation process, attributions and connotations; laying emphasis on it as a social or political science concept without inclining it to employee behaviour in businesses. This paper investigates the role of ideologies of leaders in their decision making and its effect on employee behaviour, focusing on entrepreneurs of SMEs and their employees in Ghana. The study adopts the quantitative approach using structured questionnaires as the main data collection tool. Considering conservatism and liberalism as the main forms of leadership ideologies, the transformational leadership theory is used as the lens to explain the authors’ synthesised concept of leadership ideologies and employee behaviour. A regression analysis, utilising the tolerance statistical model, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the variance inflation factor (VIF) is used to assess the multicollinearity (correlations) that exists between the variables. The coefficients of correlation reveal a positive relationship between leadership ideologies and employee behaviour. The study establishes that employee behaviour, to a limited degree is determined by the ideologies held by leaders. The researchers recommend liberalism as a more favourable leadership ideology for encouraging the realization of individual potentials of employees, enhancing creativity and cohesiveness at the workplace such as attained under transformational leadership.