The Leadership Style Preference among Sabah Ethnicities

Abstract

Leadership style is not a novel concept and has been discussed widely all over the world. With the acceleration of globalization, organizations have to adapt to new paradigms or approaches of leadership. Therefore, it is important to understand leadership preference among individuals to ensure their willingness to perform their job. Specifically, this study was conducted to identify the relationship between gender, age, education level and working experience and leadership preference. This study intends to understand the leadership preference among Sabah communities which involve three major ethnic groups in Sabah namely Malay-Brunei, Bajau and Kadazan-Dusun. The sample of this research was selected based on purposive convenient sampling whereby all respondents are located in Kota Kinabalu. A questionnaire was administered for data collection with a sample of two hundred and nineteen employees from both the public and the private sectors. The data was analyzed using one way ANOVA and the results showed that the three major ethnic groups in Sabah appear to have similar leadership preference. In addition, no significant difference was found between leadership preferences and the demographic variables.