Relationships Between Higher Education Leaders and Subordinates in Pakistan: A Path-Goal Approach

This article is based on a quantitative research to examine the leadership behaviour of degree college principals, selected personal and organizational characteristics, acceptance of leadership, faculty job satisfaction and job expectancies. Leadership style was defined in four dimensions – directive, supportive, participative, and achievement-oriented. The measuring instrument comprised 120 items and was administered to the randomly selected sample of 854 lecturers and 138 principals. Twenty-six hypotheses were tested in educational setting. MANCOVA and ANCOVA were used to discover the moderating affect of situational variables on the relationship of leadership style and subordinates’ outcomes, controlling the effect of role ambiguity and stress of the principals. The moderators tested in three-way interactions included need for autonomy, need for achievement, perception about ability, locus of control, task structure and stress. Findings indicated that the support for House’s path-goal theory was limited. Only 16 of the 26 three-way interactions accorded with the predictions of theory.