Leadership styles and employees’ voluntary work behaviors in the Ghanaian banking sector

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which leadership styles predict the voluntary work behaviors of employees. Design/methodology/approach The quantitative approach was adopted to collect data from 234 respondents. Both purposive and simple random sampling techniques were used for the selection of the respondents. Findings The findings of the study revealed that though both the transformational and transactional leadership styles positively predicted the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of employees, transformational leadership is more significant. Also, transformational leadership was found to have a significant negative relationship with the counterproductive workplace behavior (CWB) of employees, whereas transactional leadership had an insignificant relationship with CWB. Research limitations/implications The research addresses the gap in the literature on how leadership styles influence employees’ tendency to exhibit either OCB or CWB specifically in the Ghanaian context. Practical implications The findings suggested that transformational leadership should be used in the quest to encourage OCB and to mitigate CWB. Originality/value The study provides an in-depth account on how the leaders’ style influences both employees’ OCB and CWB and how to appropriately manage such voluntary behaviors.