An application towards research of the relationship between the organizational commitment of the employees and the leadership

In order to achieve the organizational goals, organizational commitment and leadership concepts are important. Nowadays, organizational commitment is a concept of which the importance is appreciated both by the academicians and the practitioners. Leadership approach of the managers affects the employees from various aspects, accordingly leadership approach of the managers is affected by the existence of the employees as well. Providing the factors that increase the employee?s organizational commitment therefore becomes one of the important tasks of the leaders.In this thesis, in addition to the handling of topics such as the definitions related to leadership, functions of leadership, the differences between the leader and the manager, classical and modern leadership theories; subjects such as the definition and importance of organizational commitment, the factors affecting organizational commitment, classification and dimensions of the organizational commitment are also discussed. Then, a descriptive research is included at the application part. The objective of this research is to analyze the relationship between the organizational commitment of the employees and the perceived leadership behavior in the organizations. Eighty four employees, who work at the headquarter of a foreign, midsize corporate company operating in finance sector, form the sample group of the research. Hypothesis created in accordance with the purpose of the study were tested by using various statistical methods at SPSS 11.5 and the analysis results were interpreted. It is clearly seen that there is a positive moderate relationship between the leadership style of the manager and employee?s organizational behavior. Also, the relationship between the leadership style of the manager and sub-dimensions of employee?s organizational behavior was analyzed. It is seen that there is a positive moderate relationship between the leadership style of the manager and the employee?s affective and normative commitments; and there is a positive low relationship between the leadership style of the manager and continuance commitment. Afterwards, it was studied if the leadership and sub-dimensions of the organizational commitment differ with respect to demographic properties. The study showed that manager?s leadership behavior differs according to employees? title and age and continuance commitment dimension differs according to employees? gender.Key Words: Leadership Approaches, Organizational Commitment, Affective Commitment, Normative Commitment, Continuance Commitment