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Abstract
The purpose of the paper is to explore the role of a leader in enhancing the faculty members' job satisfaction, as perceived by the faculty, in a public university context of Pakistan. The qualitative approach has been employed through using semi-structured interview protocol to generate rich qualitative data. Five campuses out of a total of 13 campuses/divisions were selected of a case university from where 15 faculty members were interviewed. The findings highlight that the leader 's role has been found to be critical for the faculty members' job satisfaction. The findings further show that the exercise of behaviors related to all the transformational aspects and the first dimension (contingent reward) of the transactional leadership, that design the leader's role, by leaders have been highlighted as necessary for enhancing the faculty members' job satisfaction. The defined leader's role in the present study context to enhance the faculty job satisfaction is based upon and informed by the societal and organizational context of the current research. The readers of this research are, therefore, suggested the careful use of these findings.
Keywords: Leader's Role, Job Satisfaction, Societal and Organizational Context
Introduction
There is a great deal of research that has been conducted across the world in different cultural contexts, including both collective and individualistic societies and in different educational settings such as school, college and university to explore the interplay between leadership style and teachers/faculty job satisfaction. The findings highlight that a relationship exists between
leadership behaviour and teachers/faculty job satisfaction (Al-Omari, 2008; Bogler, 2001; Grosso, 2008; Nguni et al., 2006; Stumpf, 2003). However, the degree of the relationships between different leadership styles and job satisfaction vary in different societies because of organizational and societal cultures (Bass, 1997).
Various studies highlight that in different cultural contexts certain leadership styles and even some aspects of these styles are more preferred as compared to others, while some leadership styles and in some cases their specific dimensions are even not practiced in certain contexts and are perceived as having a negative influence on job satisfaction (Avolio, 1999; Bass, 1998; Bass & Avolio, 1993 & 2000; Levine, 2000). This supports the researchers who advocate the contextually informed leadership role (Shah, 2006b; Shahin & Wright, 2004; Shaw, 2005) to enhance...