Relationship between Democratic Leadership and Organisational Performance of Dangote Cement PLC Gboko, Benue State Nigeria

This research examined the relationship between democratic leadership and organizational performance of Dangote Cement Plc Gboko. The study was anchored on Trait Theory of Leadership. Both primary and secondary source of data and information were used. Questionnaire was used to obtained information from the primary source while journals and internet constituted secondary source of data collection. Two hundred and twenty nine questionnaires (229) were administered to the staff of Dangote Cement Plc Gboko and one hundred and eighty nine (189) were properly filled and returned. The technique used in analyzing the data was Pearson Product Moment Correlation analysis with the aid of SPSS version 23.0, while percentages was used to present descriptive data. The results of the Pearson Product Moment Correlation indicate that there is a positive or direct relationship between Organizational Performance and leadership measurement in Dangote Cement, Benue State. Hence, on the basis of p-value of the estimate, we reject the null hypothesis; that is, we accept that there is a significant relationship between leadership measurement and organizational performance. An inverse relationship exists between Organizational Performance and realistic timeframe in Dangote Cement, Benue State. Also, an inverse relationship exists between Organizational Performance in Dangote Cement, Benue State and achieving teambuilding. A positive or direct relationship between Organizational Performance in Dangote Cement, Benue State and Leadership Accuracy. It was concluded that democratic leadership positively relates to organizational performance> It was recommended among others that it is advisable to practice democratic leadership in an organization especially when the rules are followed this will boast the moral of the people and they will work harder for the organization to achieve its goals.

style through experience, education and training. By this style we do not mean that how others (especially underlings) who work under him perceive his behavior (Hersey et al, 2009).
Researchers have spent much time observing the styles of leaders and have concluded that their styles can be divided into two general categories. Managing the group through paying attention and caring for the needs of individuals and ensuring that their clashes does not become serious and create a good work relationship among group members. Paying attention to the main work or task of the group, that is, work definition, meaning, when and how it should be done. They call the first democratic leadership style (circuit equation). (Morrison et al, 2007). Managers whose leadership style is of democratic type, are admired by their workers or underlings due to caring for individuals, paying attention to their personal affairs, behaving fairly and fairly with all the members of the group, being interested in hearing and accepting new thoughts and opinions and clarity and accuracy of statement (Sergioranni, 2003).
Organizational success or failure is largely dependent on the leadership style. Many studies on leadership and organization performance posited that leadership traits and behavioural paradigm of the top management affects organizational performance, Leadership method or style and systemic behavior shifted away from the characteristic of the leader to the style the leader adopted (Hemphills, Coons, 1957;Likert 1961).
Records from the style approach suggested that leaders who are addicted to democratic leadership style appeared more successful compared with managers that adopted autocratic or laissez faire leadership style of management. The Democrats believed that democratic leadership is the best style of leadership in managing an organization system of any type. They maintained that people react favorably to it in organization by increased productivity, lower unit cost, and good morale and improved labour management relation.
The democratic leader makes sure everyone's voice is heard, achieving consensus before steaming ahead. This style values others' views just as much as the leader's, trusting that decision by committee is the best way to form sturdy strategies.
Democratic leaders possess excellent communication skills, using diplomacy to elicit input from participants, and skilful facilitation to kick-start collaboration. Democratic leadership is beneficial in gaining buy-in from stakeholders, whether it's getting the go ahead from seniors or motivating team members towards goals. It's also commonly used where team members have large amounts of expertise to offer. Be cautious, however, of trying to introduce extreme democracy where a situation demands an urgent response, or where team members don't have the expertise to make highly valuable contributions at a strategic level.
According to Singapore Productivity Association (SPA, 2010): there posited that leadership is a social influence which individual exhibits and gets the support of other persons in the accomplishment of a common goal. It has to do with the role someone play in influencing followers in order to achieve organizational goals. Leadership is the process of influencing people and providing an enabling environment for them to achieve team or organizational goals and objectives. Leadership style should be dependent on the task and the people being led, the environment and the leader initiative. However, there are several types of leaders exhibiting different leadership characteristics. It is therefore a first step to understand leadership development by exposing the various styles of leadership.
Conducted a study to determine the relationship between leadership behaviours and determinant using 992 members of the organization and 846 personnel managers in the District of Columbia; using one way analysis of variance (ANOVA), it was observed that leadership style affects organizational performance. Fieldler (1996) posited that the effectiveness of leadership to a large extent is responsible for organizational performance, maintained that staff (employees) perceives employers as the image of the organization. Employees, therefore internalize the culture and becomes part and parcel of the organization, he confirmed the impact of the management styles on firm's performance and further found a strong relationship between management styled and organizational performance. Firm's development has certain factors that improve sustainability on the basis of effectiveness and efficiency.

Objective:
The main objectives of this study are to examine the 2.0 Literature Review: Theoretical Framework The trait theory of leadership: The trait theory of leadership is based on the characteristics of many leaders -both successful and unsuccessful -and is used to predict leadership effectiveness. The resulting lists of traits are then compared to those of potential leaders to assess their likelihood of success or failure. Studies in leadership were dominated by research into traits studies between the end of World War I and after World War II. However, results produced by various researches as in this area were inconsistent. As early as 1948, Skogdill reviewed about 124 studies of leadership traits and found out that leaders are fluent, more popular and know how to fix their job. Other characteristics revealed that the results were not clear and uncertain. In light of this, six studies revealed that younger leaders supported trait theory. Skogdill concluded that it would be necessary to view leadership as a relationship between people in a social setting than as a set of characteristics possessed by the leader based on the extent of traits. It was further stressed that the extent of the pattern of personal qualities of the leader should have some links to the characteristics, goals and activities of the followers. Leadership was also considered to have interactions of variables and changes.
In 1949 the study of trait theory was on high school students who were members of a particular group. They were assigned three tasks on grounds of intellectual, clerical and the last one; mechanical. It was discovered that students who emerged as leaders on ground of intellectual test tend to be leaders in clerical tests too. Other leaders emerged on the mechanical tasks. These results were not in agreement with expectations of trait theory because the leaders ought to have the same tasks assigned in recent years, with the neglect of those discrediting trait theories; leadership theory and researches have changed to other framework and approaches.  Others: charisma, creativity and flexibility.

Conceptual Framework:
Democratic leaders make the final decisions, but they include team members in the decision-making process. They encourage creativity, and people are often highly engaged in projects and decisions. As a result, team members tend to have high job satisfaction and high productivity. This is not always an effective style to use, though, when you need to make a quick decision.
Democratic leadership is based on the principles of self-determination, inclusiveness, and equal participation in the decision-making process. This leadership style is characterized by the distribution of responsibility and the empowerment of others. Democratic leaders tend to be empathetic listeners who encourage open communication through all levels of the organization. Companies with democratic leaders tend to foster a positive and motivating corporate culture, empowering employees to perform at their highest levels of capability. These companies emphasize reward over punishment, they value teamwork, and they encourage participative decision-making. Democratic leadership is most appropriate when managing an experienced and professional team of employees. Industries that lend themselves to a democratic leadership style include those that leverage creativity and creative problem solving.
Democratic leadership style reflects a leader to follower relationship. Where decision making is shared by the leaders and members of the group he leads. Under democratic leadership style, criticism and praise are objectively given. A feeling of responsibility is developed within the group and enhanced productivity. Performances are usually high. New ideas and changes are developed. It sounds easy enough. Instead of one defined leader, the group leads itself. Egalitarian to the core, democratic leaders are frustrated by the enormous effort required to build consensus for even the most mundane decisions as well as the glacial pace required to lead a group by fiat. The potential for poor decision-making and weak execution is significant here. The biggest problem with democratic leadership is its underlying assumptions that everyone has an equal stake in an outcome as well as shared levels of expertise with regard to decisions. That's rarely the case. While democratic leadership sounds good in theory, it often is bogged down in its own slow process, and workable results usually require an enormous amount of effort.
Democratic leadership, also known as participative leadership or shared leadership is a type of leadership style in which members of the group take a more participative role in the decision-making process. This type of leadership can apply to any organization, from private businesses to schools to government. Everyone is given the opportunity to participate, ideas are exchanged freely, and discussion is encouraged. While the democratic process tends to focus on group equality and the free flow of ideas, the leader of the group is still there to offer guidance and control. The democratic leader is charged with deciding who is in the group and who gets to contribute to the decisions that are made. Researchers have found that the democratic leadership style is one of the most effective types and leads to higher productivity, better contributions from group members, and increased group morale.

Characteristics of Democratic Leadership:
Some of the primary characteristics of democratic leadership include:  Group members are encouraged to share ideas and opinions, even though the leader retains the final say over decisions.  Members of the group feel more engaged in the process.  Creativity is encouraged and rewarded.
Researchers suggest that good democratic leaders possess specific traits that include: Strong democratic leaders inspire trust and respect among followers. They are sincere and base their decisions on their morals and values. Followers tend to feel inspired to take action and contribute to the group. Good leaders also tend to seek diverse opinions and do not try to silence dissenting voices or those that offer a less popular point of view.

Benefits of Democratic Leadership:
Because group members are encouraged to share their thoughts, democratic leadership can lead to better ideas and more creative solutions to problems. Group members also feel more involved and committed to projects, making them more likely to care about the end results. Research on leadership styles has also shown that democratic leadership leads to higher productivity among group members.

Organizational Performance:
The dependent variable in this study is organizational performance, while the independent variable is democratic leadership. It was observed that democratic leadership is appropriate to improve the performance of an organization. Therefore, the performance was defined as: team management work, team duties, goals and mission of the organization (Armstrong, 2015) public relation, effective input and output. Efficiency would be also count. Democratic style is an approach where employees have equal responsibility and each member have equal participation within organization. Leaders using this style provide direction, but allow the group to make its own decisions. Specifically, the leader encourages members to determine goals and procedures, and stimulates member's self-direction and selfactualization. Cole (1997) state that this style is usually considered a benefit for the most companies. This style focuses the management that provides guidance and help to its team and departments while accepting and receiving the inputs from individual team members.
These leaders not reserve to their activities and authority only but in actual they bother about consultation of employees. Bennetts & Harriman, (1999) focused that sharing responsibility and consultation are very helpful in the organization in this type of leadership the subordinates and subordinates discuss all major issues and try their best to rectify the issues, and this type other employee works as a family and also motivate and own the work with its Excellency performance that Lewin and his associate also came up with their findings that the quality of work was higher for democratic leadership style than other forms of leadership style.
In a study of "leadership behaviour and outcome", Stogdill (1994) reviewed an array on surveys and experiments mostly containing concurrent analyses of leadership behaviour and outcome, more often than not in temporary, short-term groups and without reference to possible contingent conditions. He recommended that the democratic leadership cluster (relation orientation) was more likely to be positively than negatively related to productivity, satisfaction, cohesiveness of the group. In a study of "rail road-section groups", Katz, Maccoby, Gurin, and Floor (2008) found that the groups were unproductive if their supervisors avoided exercising the leadership role and relinquished it to members of the work group. These supervisors also did not differentiate their role from the role of workers. Like their staff, they engaged in production work rather than spend their time in supervisory functions. Berrien (2006) studied groups that differed in their adaptation to changes in work. Poorly adapted groups felt little pressure from their superiors and appeared to attribute their poor performance to lax discipline. In the same way, Murnighan and Leung's (2001) experiment found that undergraduate participants who were led by uninvolved leaders were less productive in the quality and quantity of the problems they solved and lower in satisfaction in comparison to participants who were led by involved leaders. Argyris (2007) conducted a case study in bank in which the management recruited supervisors who dislikes conflicts, hostility and aggression, and who wanted to be left alone. The bank's recruitment policy fostered in employees a norm of low work standard and unexpressed dissatisfaction.
Group members under laissez-faire leadership reported more isolation from the leaders and less empowerment in decision making than those under directive leadership. The result suggested the laissez-faire leadership was associated with lower task motivation and lower satisfaction with superiors. Similarly, in a study titled "the three styles of leadership" MacDonald's (2007) examined three styles of leadership (laissez-faire, autocratic and democratic) and found that laissez-faire leadership was associated with the highest rates of truancy and delinquency and with the slowest modifications in performance.

Methodology:
This research employed descriptive research design. The study used primary from the sampled population and secondary sources like textbooks, journals, internet resources. For the primary sources of data collection, views of staff of Dangote Cement Gboko Benue State Nigeria were obtained through structured interview and questionnaire.
The population for this study is one hundred and eighty nine (189) employees. The study employed census sampling, a non-probability sampling method to select all the employees of the company as the population is not large enough to sample the population. The research instrument is a four-point scale type of questionnaire which captured four questions for each of the objectives. The statistical tools employed were the Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficients (r) to examine objectives of the study. Also, descriptive statistics of frequencies and percentages was used to present descriptive views of the respondents on the objectives of the study.   The result of the descriptive statistics indicates that 31.22% of the respondents show that the realistic timeframe has to be projected to reduce lost to the area of organization expenditure while 20.63% of the respondents thinks otherwise. 27.51% of the respondents indicated that the realistic timeframe will make the organization to execute its budget for its smooth performance. However, 23.28% of the sampled population strongly disagreed to the statement that the realistic timeframe will make the organization to execute its budget for its smooth performance. Majority of the respondents 33.33% and 25.93% agreed and strongly agreed that the realistic timeframe makes each organization set up target and achieve it. 22.75% and 17.99% disagreed and strongly disagreed to the statement. Also, majority of the respondents 42.86% strongly agreed that the realistic timeframe set up competition for organization to develop plans to better its performance    On the basis of p-value of the estimate, we reject the null hypothesis; that is, we accept that there is a significant relationship between leadership measurement and organizational performance.

 Realistic timeframe:
There is an inverse relationship between realistic timeframe and Organizational Performance in Dangote Cement, Benue State and realistic timeframe. Therefore, as realistic timeframe increase by a unit, organizational performance decreases by 6.6%. The result of the study indicates that the strength of the relationship is 0.066 ** or 6.6% and the relationship is statistically significant (p<0.01). On the basis of p-value of the estimate, we reject the null hypothesis; that is, we accept that there is a significant relationship between realistic timeframe and organizational performance.

 Achieving Teambuilding:
An inverse relationship between Organizational Performance in Dangote Cement, Benue State and achieving teambuilding. Therefore, as teambuilding increase by a unit, organizational performance decreases by 12.4%. The result of the study indicates that the strength of the relationship is 0.124 ** or 12.4% and the relationship is not statistically significant (p>0.01). On the basis of pvalue of the estimate, we accept the null hypothesis; that is, we accept that there is no significant relationship between realistic timeframe and organizational performance.

 Leadership Accuracy:
There is a positive or direct relationship between Organizational Performance in Dangote Cement, Benue State and Leadership Accuracy. Therefore, as Leadership Accuracy increase by a unit, organizational performance increases by 35.5%. The magnitude of the correlation coefficient indicates the strength of the association between the two variables. The result of the study indicates that the strength of the relationship is 0.355 ** or 35.5% and the relationship is statistically significant (p<0.01). On the basis of p-value of the estimate, we reject the null hypothesis; that is, we accept that there is a statistically significant relationship between Leadership Accuracy and organizational performance.

Conclusion and Recommendations:
From the findings it showed that the majority of the respondents agreed that democratic leadership positively relates to organizational performance. The study found that democratic leadership variables, in which employees are allowed to have sense of belonging, carry out higher responsibility with little supervision, and followers are helped to achieve their visions and needs enhance organizational efficiency. The study concludes that democratic leadership construct have direct significant relationship with organizational performance.
It is advisable to practice democratic leadership in an organization especially when the rules are followed this will boast the moral of the people and they will work harder for the organization to achieve its goals.
It is the desire of every organization to achieve its goals when fairness is observed in the system the workers will contribute more to enhance the performance of the organization.