Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to reveal the relationship between the organizational culture and leadership in travel agencies. In order to achieve this goal, a survey that contains the measure of organizational culture adapted from that of Deshpande et al. by Ogbonna and Harris and the measure of perceived leadership style adapted from that of House and House and Dessler by Ogbonna and Harris. The organization culture of each travel agency and leadership styles of managers were measured by this survey. As the sample of this study, 136 employees of travel agencies in the region of Kusadasi were selected through simple random sampling method. Preliminary construct validity of leadership and organizational culture was tested using exploratory factor analysis. The existence of four dimensions of organizational culture and three dimensions of leadership, as measured by Ogbonna and Harris, were supported: for organization culture; innovative culture, competitive culture, bureaucratic culture, and community culture and for leadership; participative leadership, supportive leadership, and instrumental leadership. Internal consistency, as assessed by Cronbach's alpha, for each of the content areas within each of three leadership styles and four organization culture types, was found to be adequate to demonstrate reliability. Correlation analysis was made to determine the relationship between organizational culture and leadership and organizational culture. The regression analysis for the relation of the organizational culture to the leadership was done. According to correlation analysis, it was found that there is a significant and positive relationship between innovative culture and competitive culture; between supportive leadership and innovative culture; between instrumental leadership and community culture; participative leadership and innovative culture; there is a significant but negative relationship between participative leadership and the bureaucratic culture. According to regression analysis, community culture was determined to be the best organizational culture type for travel agencies in Kusadası.

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