Leadership Styles and Organisational Productivity: A Case Study of Ghana Cement Limited

Leadership is of utmost importance in every institution or organization because of its far-reaching effects on the accomplishment of objectives and organisational growth. It is believed that effective functioning of social systems is largely dependent on the quality of leadership. Leadership behavior of managers has been consistently associated with employee output; and leadership styles of individual managers are powerful predictors of the organizational effectiveness. People, therefore get excited about the topic of leadership. They want to know what makes a great leader, has leadership any impact on organizational performance and personal career success, and what leadership style works? The study was about leadership styles of organizations and their relationship with employee output and the overall organisational productivity. The researcher adopted Convenience and Purposive Sampling methods to collect both qualitative and quantitative data in order to achieve the research objectives. In total, forty (40) respondents were used for the study. The findings revealed that leadership is an important ingredient for high performance. It also came out that the leadership style that involves the subordinates in decision making is the leadership that works. In addition, the study revealed that leadership enhances the competencies and relations, and also help increase employees output. In conclusion, leadership will continue to be an important tool that provides competitive advantage for every organisation, in that it makes employees efficient and effective. The kind of leadership style managers exhibit to an extent determines how confident and motivated an employee will be in performing his duties. Indeed a good leader is a motivator. Finally the researcher recommends that organisations develop long-term strategies to train the workforce especially in leadership styles, to create an enabling environment for career development for employees in order to give of their best. Keywords: Motivation, leadership, productivity and management

Modeling the Macroeconomic and Demographic Determinants of Life Insurance Demand in Ghana Using the Elastic Net Algorithm

The government of Ghana and the National Insurance Commission have shown concern over the low insurance patronage in Ghana. In order to take the necessary steps to increase insurance patronage, there is the need to, among other things, find the macroeconomic determinants of insurance demand in Ghana. The purpose of this study is to model the macroeconomic and demographic determinants of life insurance demand in Ghana. Data covering the period 1994 through 2020 are used for the study. Even though many studies have been done on determinants of insurance demand elsewhere (not in Ghana), almost all these studies use ordinary least square regression, stepwise regression, or similar regression methods. However, these methods are not robust enough to handle problems of multicollinearity, over-fitting, and inability to do out-of-sample prediction. This current study uses a regularization method known as elastic net regression algorithm which is more robust for handling the aforementioned problems, and more. The results of the study show that the dominating predictors (those with non-zero coefficients) of life insurance demand include old aged dependency ratio, life expectancy, urbanization, and financial development. The first three have positive relation with life insurance demand, while the last one has negative relation with life insurance demand. Insurance regulators and insurance companies are advised to design more innovative and attractive insurance policies for the aged and the old aged dependents as they have the highest tendency to affect insurance demand in Ghana