179 Leadership Styles and Organisational Eﬀectiveness in Selected Public Universities in Uganda Leadership Styles and Organisational Eﬀectiveness in Selected Public Universities in Uganda Wilberforce Turyahikayo 1 , Wilson Mugizi 2 , George Wilson Kasule 3 1,2,3 Department of Educational Planning and Management, School of Education, Kyambogo University P.O. Box 1 Kyambogo, Kampala, Uganda Corresponding author email: wturya1234@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.58653/nche.v11i1.14 (Accepted: 15th December 2023/Published: 28th December 2023) Abstract This study assessed the inﬂuence of leadership styles on organisational eﬀectiveness of selected public universities in Uganda. Speciﬁcally, the study assessed the inﬂuence of transformational, transactional and laissez-faire leadership styles on organisational eﬀectiveness. The study used the correlational research design on a sample of 93 respondents that were university managers, namely administrative and academic heads of Busitema and Kyambogo Universities in Uganda. Data was collected using a self-administered questionnaire and analysed using quantitative methods that were descriptive and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with the help of SmartPLS. Descriptive results revealed that organisational eﬀectiveness, the use of transactional and laissez-faire leadership styles were moderate while the use of the transformational leadership style was high. SEM results indicated that while the transformational and transactional leadership styles had a signiﬁcant positive inﬂuence on organisational eﬀectiveness, the laissez-faire leadership style had a positive but insigniﬁcant inﬂuence on organisational eﬀectiveness. It was, therefore, concluded that the transformational leadership and transactional leadership styles are imperative for organisational eﬀectiveness of public universities but the laissez-faire style is not. The study recommended that university leaders should emphasise the use of the transformational and transactional leadership styles to enhance organisational eﬀectiveness. However, university leaders should minimise the use of the laissez-faire leadership style. The signiﬁcance of this study is that it identiﬁes leadership styles that are necessary for enhancing organisational eﬀectiveness. Keywords: Laissez-faire; Transformational; Transactional; Leadership styles; Organisational eﬀectiveness. Introduction The concept of organisational eﬀectiveness is one of the most elusive and controversial in organisational literature (Rojas, 2000). Organisational eﬀectiveness describes the degree of achievement of an organisation measured in terms of ﬁnancial, operational and structural attainments that enable the long-term survival and sustainability of the organisation (Sharma & Singh, 2019). Jha et al. (2019) point out that organisational