What are leadership styles that Thai engineering organization prefer?

Abstract

The objective of this study was to identify Thai engineers’ perspective on leadership styles that they preferred. This study focused on two leadership style transformational and transactional leadership styles because these two leadership styles were identified as the most effectiveness leadership style (e.g. Moghaddam, 2006; Moore, 2007; Robbins & Judge, 2013). This study used qualitative approach to interview eight engineers from one sampling Thai engineering organization. Qualitative approach was useful for discovering and provides result in-depth to get deeper understanding from respondents. The finding of this study showed that Thai engineering organization preferred transformational leadership style with a great benefit to the engineers. However, this study used small sample size and studied only one Thai engineering organization and captured only engineers’ perspective. Future study should seek for managements’ perspective on effective leadership styles for Thai engineering organization and study other Thai engineering organizations. KEY WORDS: Transformational leadership / Transactional leadership / Rewards / Thai engineering organization.