Problem statement:

As a title of my thesis, I have chosen: “The impact of leadership styles on the performance,
motivation and job satisfaction of employees in Morocco.”
Abstract: A leadership style is a leader's way of providing direction, implementing plans, and
motivating people. It impacts directly the performance of any employee. Many leadership styles
exist in our country. This thesis will try to measure the size of that impact as well as how
employees react to the difference styles using quantitative methods.
Research concepts:
Leadership: The process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be
done and how to do it. (Gary Yukl 2006)
Leadership style: A leadership style is a leader's method of providing direction, implementing
plans, and motivating people. (John P Kotter 2001)
Employee performance: how well workers can conduct their required job duties. Evaluating
performance is an easy way to pinpoint the need for additional training and mentoring to improve
your workforce. (Ashley Donohoe 2019)
Employee motivation: psychological forces that determine the direction of a person's behavior in
an organization, a person's level of effort and a person's level of persistence (Jones, Gareth R.;
George, Jennifer M. 2008)
Job satisfaction: a measure of workers' contentedness with their job, whether they like the job or
individual aspects or facets of jobs, such as nature of work or supervision. (Spector, P.E. 1997)
Statement of the problem:
Despite the growing interest in human resources management and organizational behavior, the
subjects of leadership styles, employee motivation, performance and job satisfaction are not
treated in many papers in the context of Morocco. As a matter of fact, only a few articles have
directly treated this impact of leadership styles on the employee motivation and satisfaction
although it is a very important topic. According to Employee Benefits News, it was reported in
2017 that turnover can cost employers 33 percent of an employee’s annual salary. Which means
that it will be interesting to know how every leadership style can affect employees in order to be
proactive and correct possible issues or predict the preferences of employees and help in their
motivation.
Purpose of the thesis and research question:
The objective of this thesis is to investigate the effect of different leadership styles can affect the
employees’ motivation, satisfaction and performance. In addition, and in case an effect was
found, I will assess it using quantitative methods and try to come out with conclusions and
recommendations that can be used by many companies in Morocco. As a limitation, I do not
think that these findings will be applicable in other contexts due to the specificity of the
Moroccan society and culture. Therefore, the main research question will be: How does the
leadership styles impact the employees’ motivation, satisfaction and performance?
Gap in the literature:
The impact of leadership styles on the performance, motivation and job satisfaction of employees
in Morocco was not directly treated in any existing paper. A paper by Dr. Hassi In text citation
treated a subject close to the one chose. The article called “You get what you appreciate” had as
purpose to study the influences of transactional and transformational leadership styles on
employee job satisfaction, employee affective commitment and organizational citizenship
behavior (Hassi, 2019) The findings were that employee job satisfaction, affective commitment
and OCB are only impacted by the personal recognition dimension of the transformational
leadership style. However, the usage of cross-sectional research design limited the establishment
of cause-and-effect relationship that I want to investigate. The only other paper treating the
subject is called “The effect of leadership on public service motivation: a multiple embedded case
study in Morocco”. It was published in 2020 in BMJ open but it was too specific because it was
about health workers in the Moroccan public sector.