Rewards, Rules and Belonging: How Structured Leadership Builds Commitment in Somaliland’s Universities

Transactional leadership has long been treated as the uninspiring cousin of the leadership world: the style that trades rewards for compliance, monitors performance, and corrects deviations from the rules. Charismatic, transformational, servant and authentic leadership styles have dominated the research literature and the management bestseller lists, while the transactional leader, the one who sets clear expectations and pays for results, has often been dismissed as a relic of bureaucratic organizations. A new study from public universities in Somaliland, published in the open-access journal Discover Education, challenges that hierarchy of prestige with hard numbers, showing that exchange-based leadership can build genuine psychological attachment to an institution when it works through two powerful channels: organizational culture and employee motivation.

The research, conducted by Abokor Hassan of the University of Burao’s School of Postgraduate Studies and Research, surveyed 278 faculty members and administrative staff across four public higher education institutions: the University of Burao, the University of Hargeisa, Burao Central University College and Sanag University. These universities anchor Somaliland’s public higher education system, a system that operates under persistent strain. Reports from the country’s Ministry of Education and National Higher Education Commission describe chronic resource constraints, weak internal governance, limited strategic management capacity and inadequate funding, conditions that make employee commitment both harder to earn and more critical to sustain.

The study’s central question is deceptively simple: does transactional leadership make university employees more committed to their institutions, and if so, how? Organizational commitment, in the psychological sense, is not mere attendance or compliance. It reflects an employee’s emotional attachment to the organization, identification with its goals and values, and willingness to exert effort on its behalf. Decades of research link high commitment to better job performance, lower turnover intentions and stronger institutional effectiveness, which matters enormously for universities that depend on dedicated staff for teaching, research and student services.

To answer the question, the study drew on four complementary theoretical pillars. Social exchange theory, developed by Peter Blau, holds that employees reciprocate favorable treatment with positive attitudes and loyalty. Frederick Herzberg’s two-factor theory distinguishes intrinsic motivators such as achievement, recognition and responsibility from extrinsic hygiene factors such as salary, job security and working conditions. Cameron and Quinn’s competing values framework conceptualizes organizational culture along clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy dimensions. Finally, Meyer and Allen’s three-component model classifies commitment into affective, continuance and normative forms, which the study combined into a single higher-order measure of overall commitment.

Methodologically, the research followed a quantitative, cross-sectional design analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, a statistical framework well suited to testing networks of relationships among latent psychological constructs. The four universities were purposively selected for their strategic importance and regional diversity, and a stratified random sampling procedure, sized with the adjusted Cochran formula for finite populations, distributed 320 questionnaires. After screening, 278 valid responses remained, an effective response rate of 86.9 percent. Transactional leadership was measured with items adapted from the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire of Bass and Avolio, commitment with the three-component model questionnaire, culture with the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument, and motivation with indicators grounded in Herzberg’s theory.

The statistical results tell a layered story. Transactional leadership showed a direct, positive and statistically significant effect on organizational commitment, with a path coefficient of 0.260. But its influence on the two proposed mediators was even stronger: the style explained 21.3 percent of the variance in organizational culture and 15.4 percent of the variance in employee motivation, with effect sizes in the medium range. In turn, both culture and motivation independently predicted commitment. Bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples confirmed significant indirect effects through each mediator, accounting for roughly 23.8 percent of the total effect through culture and 24.0 percent through motivation. Together, the two pathways carried nearly half of the leadership’s total impact, and because the direct effect remained significant, the study classified both as partial mediators.

The model’s explanatory and predictive credentials were tested with unusual rigor for this research area. The three predictors jointly explained 45.3 percent of the variance in organizational commitment, a moderate level, and blindfolding procedures confirmed predictive relevance for every endogenous construct. A PLS-predict analysis comparing the model against a linear regression benchmark found lower prediction errors for 19 of 20 indicators, indicating high out-of-sample predictive power. The researchers also confronted the classic weakness of single-source survey data, common method bias, with both procedural safeguards and statistical checks: Harman’s single-factor test showed the first factor explaining only 21.5 percent of variance, well below the 50 percent warning threshold, and all inner variance inflation factors fell under the conservative cutoff of 3. A Gaussian copula endogeneity assessment found no significant copula terms, suggesting the estimated paths are not distorted by reverse causality or omitted variables.

What do these numbers mean in practice? The picture that emerges is of transactional leadership as an architectural force rather than a merely transactional one. By clarifying role expectations, enforcing consistent performance feedback and administering transparent contingent rewards, leaders shape the shared norms and behavioral standards that constitute organizational culture. A cohesive culture, in turn, gives employees a sense of belonging and identification with institutional goals. Simultaneously, the same exchange mechanisms feed motivation: predictable rewards and fair recognition satisfy both the hygiene factors that prevent dissatisfaction and, through recognition and achievement, some of the intrinsic motivators that drive engagement. The finding that motivation carried a slightly larger share of the mediated effect than culture suggests that in resource-constrained settings, the psychological experience of being treated fairly and rewarded predictably may be the more immediate lever.

The study is candid about its limits. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causal ordering, and self-reported data from a single time point remain vulnerable to response bias despite the remedies applied. The sample was 73.7 percent male and skewed toward younger professionals, and the focus on public universities in one developing country limits generalizability to private institutions and other contexts. The transactional leadership scale also showed relatively modest internal consistency, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.680, prompting a call for further instrument validation and for qualitative approaches such as interviews and focus groups. Longitudinal and time-lagged designs are recommended to strengthen causal inference.

Even so, the implications reach beyond Somaliland. For university administrators, the study recommends institutionalizing transactional practices deliberately: clear performance contracts, transparent reward criteria and regular feedback mechanisms, paired with cultural initiatives such as shared-values workshops, participatory decision-making forums and open communication systems. Motivation strategies including recognition schemes, fair promotion criteria and non-monetary appreciation such as professional development opportunities round out the prescription. For policymakers, the findings argue for leadership development programs, performance management frameworks and incentive structures designed around the insight that structured, exchange-based leadership, far from being a motivational dead end, can generate durable psychological commitment when it is embedded in a supportive culture. In institutions where every retained lecturer and administrator counts, that is a finding worth taking seriously.

Subject of Research: The mediating roles of organizational culture and employee motivation in the link between transactional leadership and organizational commitment in Somaliland public universities

Article Title: The mediating role of organizational culture and employee motivation in the relationship between transactional leadership and organizational commitment

Article References: Hassan, A. (2026). The mediating role of organizational culture and employee motivation in the relationship between transactional leadership and organizational commitment. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 878. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02108-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02108-2

Keywords: transactional leadership, organizational commitment, organizational culture, employee motivation, PLS-SEM, higher education, Somaliland, public universities, social exchange theory, Herzberg two-factor theory, mediation analysis, organizational psychology