Effects of Leadership Styles on Soldiers` Turnover Intention of Sri Lanka Army

Abstract

Leaders are known to practice different leadership styles to accomplish missions in the Army. Thus the challenge for Sri Lanka Army leadership is to ensure that leadership practices in organizations are in accordance with performances to achieve the intended goals. For that purpose, it is necessary to retain soldiers. Retaining those quality soldiers who are currently serving must be a significant focus of the service over the next several years. Without leadership emphasis, the Army’s retention rates could drop. Further, without the development of key leadership skills, retention rates may suffer. The overall objective of this paper is to find which outcomes could take through the commitment of military leadership and soldiers’ turnover intention in post war context. Since this is a vast subject area, the researcher attempted to find out the relationship between two leadership styles within people concern and task concern axis which affects the turnover intention of soldiers. Through this effort the researcher expects to identify specific areas needed to be developed in military leadership and how we can reduce turnover intention of soldiers. To study that a questionnaire was given to 50 Other Rankers from different regiments of the Sri Lanka Army. The relationships between the variables of the study were analyzed using Pearson’s correlation coefficient analysis and after analyzing the results it was found that leadership styles have no significant effect on soldiers’ turnover intention of the Sri Lanka Army.