Relationship between Personnel’s Organizational Commitment with Managers’ Leadership Styles in Sport Organizations of Iran

The Objective of the current research is to study and analyze two important variables affecting organizational success and efficacy of organizations; these variables are leadership style and organizational commitment. This research is a description-correlation study and was conducted as a field survey. The research sample consists of 141 individuals including personnel and managers of the Physical Education Organization of East Azerbaijan Province. The following questionnaires were used for data collection: personal features, organizational commitment, leadership behavior description (duty-driven), and leadership style (Transformational and interactive). Deductive statistics, Spearman correlation coefficient in significance level of α=0.05 were used for data analysis, and descriptive statistics were used for describing the respective variables. The results showed that transformational leadership style has a positive and significant correlation with organizational commitment while interactive leadership style exhibits a negative and significant relationship with organizational commitment. No significant correlation was observed between duty-driven leadership and organizational commitment. Based on the findings of the current research, the relationship of transformational leadership in most cases is stronger and firmer than those of interactive and duty-driven leadership, and, transformational leadership style contributes to greater organizational commitment for the personnel under supervision. Taking into account the features such as observance of respect, reliance, and admiration of staff besides assigning authorization to the personnel and clarification of organizational objectives, transformational leadership style can transform its followers’ expectations and motivate them to have further committed to the objectives and the organization.