The Impact of Gender Leadership Styles on the Individual Creativity in Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the impact of gender leadership styles on the individual creativity in the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The Palestinian NGOs sector has been expanded in the recent year despite the dependence on the fluctuating outside funding. As a result, the internal competition has increased to capture opportunities and projects. Therefore, NGOs leaders need to invest in employee's creativity to convince the outside donor and make a social and economic impact in Palestine. The descriptive and evaluative approach has been used to answer the study questions and test the study hypothesis. The data were collected by two separated structured questionnaires: (1) Leaders’ questionnaires which were distributed to the managers of the NGOs institutions, and (2) employees questionnaires which were distributed to the NGO’s employees. Both questionnaires include the translated Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ6x) scale of leadership styles and their dimensions which were used in this thesis (1) transformational leadership style (i.e. idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration), VI (2) Transactional leadership styles (i.e. contingent reward and management by exception), and finally laissez-faire leadership, and the individual creativity dimensions (i.e. domain- relevant skills, creativity-relevant skills and intrinsic task motivation). Whereas in the employees questionnaires the terms were reformed to measure their leader's attribute toward them. The two questionnaires were developed, approved and edited to reach the final form which distributed to the target respondents. The population of the study is the managers and employees of NGOs institutions and nonprofit organizations operated in all business in Palestine. A random sample of 396 manager and employees were collected, where the managers were (94) and the employees were (302). The results illustrate that male transformational, male transactional and female transformational leaders have a significant positive correlation with individual creativity. In contrast, male laissez-faire leadership, female transactional and female laissez-faire leadership style has no correlation with the individual creativity. This study found that female's transformational leaders have an impact on investing in their creative employees to make the social impact and compete with other Palestinian NGOs institution. In contrast, there's no significant impact of male (transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire) leadership styles on individual creativity due to managers who worked in the Palestinian NGOs. It also reveals that gender transformational, gender transactional, and gender laissez-faire leaders play a role in Palestinian NGOs due to the manager's sample. Moreover, the dimensions of individual creativity: domain- relevant skills, creativity-relevant skills, and intrinsic task motivation play a role in the Palestinian NGOs in both male and female samples. As a result, the researcher recommends acknowledging NGOs managers and employees about different leadership styles, to recognize which leadership style each VII manager perform, to motivate creative employees and encourage them, at the same time developing their capabilities, and their important impact on the sustainability of the Palestinian NGOs. Also, acknowledging the NGOs manager's about the importance of individual creativity in achieving the organizational goals.