The transformational leadership style as practiced by the organization leaders was examined in their role to enhance employees’ competency for organization performance. A quantitative approach is used in this study using a survey approach through the distribution of a set of questionnaires. In this study, the sample comprised of 232 supervisors from three food manufacturing industries in various supervisory levels, departments, and sections within the production line. The hypotheses were analyzed using IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and partial least squares (PLS-SEM) SmartPLS version 3.0. The statistical analysis results confirm that there was a significant relationship between transformational leadership styles, employees’ competency with organizational performance. The study also confirmed that the transformational leadership styles as practiced substantially contributed to employee competency. Based on the PLS-SEM’s results, this study provides evidence that transformational leadership styles also substantially contributed to organization performance. The study also found that employee competency has contributed to organization performance. Based on the mediation analysis results, the study finds that employee competency mediates the relationship between transformational leadership style and organization performance. These results add to an understanding of the role of transformational leadership style and employee competency in contributing to a higher productivity and organization performance.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in India are currently facing the challenges of increased competitions. In such environment, labor retention is very important factor for competition and survival. In this context, appropriate leadership styles and Quality of Work Life (QWL) are very important factors for survival. Literature on QWL is limited to SMEs and several studies commonly correlated with only QWL dimensions but no study on QWL has association with Leadership styles. This empirical study is accomplished to predict QWL in relation to Transformational and Transactional leadership styles. The sample consists of 240 Mechanical Manufacturing SMEs in Bangalore, India. To draw the inference chi-square test, Pearson correlation and regression analysis was carried out for the collected data using Mini Tab14. The results indicate that 25% of SMEs have implemented good QWL, in 56.6% of SMEs have implemented Transformational leadership styles; QWL of SMEs has significant association with Leadership styles. QWL and Leadership styles of SMEs are independent of demographical factors of SMEs like age of the firms, size of the firms, and cost of the project. QWL dimensions like work environment, relation and cooperation, autonomy of work has a significant association with leadership style. For both transformational and transactional leadership style job satisfaction and job security has highest correlation coefficient.