Leadership Styles of the Campus Principals and Divisional Directors in a Public University of Pakistan

The purpose of the study is to identify the leadership styles (transformational, transactional and laissez-faire) of the campus principals/divisional directors of a public university in Pakistan. This research adopted quantitative approach to conduct the study and accordingly it falls in post positivism paradigm philosophically. The study is descriptive in its specific nature. The study adopted a survey approach, and all the 287 faculty members of the university were included in the sample to collate quantitative data through Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ). Data analysis has been done by using mean, standard deviation and t-test (1-tailed). The findings suggest that the transformational leadership style is comparatively being more often exercised by the leaders, followed by the transactional leadership style, while the laissez-faire leadership style is the least practiced. In comparison to all nine dimensions of the three leadership styles, inspirational motivation with the highest mean is the key leadership dimension practiced by the leaders. Idealized influence (behavior) and management-by-exception (active) dimensions also play a pivotal role in shaping the leadership style of the leaders.