Abstract
The present study examines what kind of leadership behavior has the effect of increasing subordinate job satisfaction (JS) in situations of high environmental uncertainty (EU), and those of low EU. First of all, I examine this topic using PM leadership theory and path-goal theory, which differ in their basic standpoints. Clearly, those theories are not appropriate for leadership in situations of high EU. Therefore, from a completely new point of view four hypotheses are deduced.
Questionnaires were administered to 146 full-time employees. The results supported all but one of those four hypotheses. The results suggest that if EU is high and subordinate growth need strength is large, leader human-relation orientedbehavior and participative behavior might be important in increasing subordinate JS, but leader work-oriented behavior might not be. That suggests the low predictive ability of the present theories, such as path-goal theory, in such cases. Furthermore, when EU is high and subordinate growth need strength is small, there is a positive correlation between only leader work-oriented behavior and subordinates JS. However, in situations of low EU, regardless of the degree of subordinate growth need strength, both leader human-relation orientedbehavior and work-oriented behavior have a positive correlation with subordinate JS.
