ASSESSING THE INFLUENCE OF LEADERSHIP STYLES ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE IN NIGERIAN CONSTRUCTION FIRMS

Leadership plays a vital role in the success or failure of any organization. Lack of effectiveleadership style leads to poor innovation, low productivity and inability to meet performancetargets. Effective leadership enhance employee performance. This study assessed the impact ofleadership style on employee performance in Nigerian construction firms. This was achievedby establishing the relationship between leadership styles and employee performance. Fiveleadership styles and six employee performance measures were adopted for the study. Astructured questionnaire was administered to employees of construction firms to identify theleadership style adopted in Nigerian Construction firms and to establish the level of adherenceto performance standards. The questionnaire was administered to 328 construction firms inNigeria, 179 (54.7%) were completed and analyzed. SPSS 22 was adopted for the descriptivestatistics while Smartpls3 was used for the inferential Statistics. The result of the descriptivestatistics shows that, team leadership style ranked the highest with a grand mean of 4.28.Commitment of employee ranked the highest performance measure with a grand mean of 4.30.The result of the inferential statistics shows that team leadership has the highest number ofsignificant relationships with employee performance thus making it the preferred leadershipstyle for employee performance improvement in Nigerian Construction firms. The studyrecommended the training and adoption of team leadership style for employee performanceimprovement.