Leadership Styles, Work Engagement, and Job Satisfaction: A Job Demands-Resources Perspective from Globacom Limited, Nigeria’s Contracting Telecommunications Operator

Abstract

Employee engagement in sub-Saharan Africa stands at 19 per cent, the second-lowest of any world region, and Nigeria’s telecommunications sector has lost thousands of skilled staff to emigration in recent years. Whether supervisory leadership behaviour can offset this pressure, and by what mechanism, remains largely untested in African private-sector settings. Drawing on Job Demands-Resources theory, this study examines whether work engagement mediates the relationships between three leadership styles, transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire, and employee job satisfaction. Data were collected from 380 employees of Globacom Limited, a major Nigerian telecommunications operator undergoing sustained commercial contraction, using validated scales assembled into a single structured questionnaire, and analysed with partial least squares structural equation modelling and 5,000-subsample bootstrapping. The measurement model met all established thresholds for reliability and validity. Transformational leadership was the strongest positive predictor of engagement and satisfaction; transactional leadership showed smaller positive effects; laissez-faire leadership predicted both outcomes negatively, with an effect on engagement comparable in size to that of transactional leadership. Work engagement was the strongest single predictor of satisfaction and significantly mediated all three leadership pathways, in each case through complementary partial mediation. The findings extend Job Demands-Resources theory to a resource-scarce African organisational context and offer a theory-grounded basis for prioritising leadership behaviours in retention strategy.