Relationship between Leadership Style and Organisational Culture with Intention to Leave’ Expatriates in Saudi Health Care System

Foud Alorhiri*, Richard Giordano* and Alan Borthwick*

University of Southampton

Abstract: Employees’ turnover has always been the main concern and interest of both academics and practitioner in the healthcare sector. Also, both leadership styles and organisational culture as the main contributors to employee’s intention to leave have always been in central attention of most the scholars in different disciplines including healthcare and organisational studies. After developing a conceptual framework and hypotheses related to the relationships, a questionnaire was designed based on the existing literatures in these areas and distributed among 850 employees working in one public hospital in Saudi Arabia. Out of 850 questionnaires distributed 354 usable questionnaires were returned which provide around 40 percent response rate. The results of this study were interesting and in some respect unexpected in some area. The findings show that transactional leadership style has no both direct and indirect relationship with intention to leave which was surprising and require further investigation. On the other hand, the results of this study confirm the importance of both transformational leadership style and organisational culture on the intention to leave among expatiates in public sector

Keywords: Leadership style, Organisational Culture, Intention to leave, Public health car.