Abstract:
Leadership has been seen by management practitioners as one of the key functions of management and as such has been a subject of considerable research. Various studies conducted on leadership styles identified three basic styles, namely: autocratic, democratic, and laissez faire or free rein. But the particles style to be adopted has created a lot of problems to many group leaders. This study therefore is to find out the determinants of effective leadership style with special emphasis on United Bank for Africa in Enugu metropolis. To achieve these objectives, questioners were distributed to two hundred and thirty six (236) respondents which were sampled from the total population of three hundred and thirty nine (339). Data were collected from the respondents and analyzed using simple percentages and Chi-square (x2). From the analysis, the following were discovered as the determinants of effective leadership style; organization’s external environment, personality of leaders and subordinates, the organization’s culture and polices the organization’s structure, time element and others. It was also discovered that leadership style has a significant relationship with the subordinate performances. Based on the analysis and findings, we conclude that no one trait is common to all effective leaders and no one style of leadership is effective in all situations. In other words, the effectiveness of a particular leadership style depends on factors in each situation. We finally recommended that for a leader to be effective, he should consider the situation or his leadership environment in order to determine the best style of leadership for effective achievement of the group objectives.
