Impact of Leadership Styles on Employee Motivation and Commitment in Public and Private Sectors in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the public policies are articulated, but the rigidity of public management policies and procedures has hindered the managers from effectively contributing to managing employees and resources. The mass in public leadership has drawn the attention of people toward comparing leaders in the public sector with those in the private sector. Leadership in the private sector is considered to be more effective in human resource management than leadership in the public sector. This chapter aims at studying leadership styles in the public and private sectors of the Kurdistan Region with an emphasis on finding commonalities and differences in the impact of the present leadership on employee motivation and commitment to resource management in both sectors. We apply both quantitative and qualitative methods in the use of questionnaires and interviews across both sectors. We find differences in leadership style orientation in both sectors; transformational leadership is found to positively relate to employee motivation and commitment in public sector organizations, and transactional leadership is found to positively relate to employee motivation and commitment in the private sector. The major recommendation of the study is that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) should induce an evaluation and assessment system that examines the behaviors of public managers to make their leadership best deal with the recent awareness of the workforce and managing resources.