The purpose of this study was to examine the leadership styles and organizational commitment inrnEthiopia Institute of Agricultural Research. The study employed descriptive research design. Therntarget population of interest in this study was made up of EIAR employees found in its headrnoffice and twelve research centers who were 3843 in total both from researcher, technical andrnadministrative staff. The sample size was 351 employees of EIAR who were selected using arnstratified sampling technique and were divided into homogeneous group (researchers, technicalrnand administrative staff) and the sample elements were selected proportionally from eachrnstratum by using a simple random sampling technique. Data was collected using twornstandardized questionnaires namely Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) andrnOrganizational commitment questionnaire (OCQ) and analyzed using STATA and SPSS datarnanalysis software. Descriptive statistics used to describe the basic features of the data,rncorrelational analysis was used to test the association between dependent variables andrnindependent variables, ANOVA was employed to cheek the significance difference amongrnvariables and Post-hoc comparisons were applied to compare the existing difference betweenrngroups. The findings were presented using figures, tables and charts. The findings of the studyrndisclosed that the overall mean values for each of the transformational leadership subscalesrnwere relatively close to 2.5 except Individualized consideration. The overall mean values for therntransactional leadership ranged from 1.33 to 2.51 and the overall mean values for laissez-fairernleadership was 1.18. There was significant perception difference between administrative staffrnand research staff regards to management-by-exception (passive) and Laissez-Faire leadership.rnLeaders of researcher staff displayed more of management-by-exception (passive), and laissezfairernleadership behaviors. With regards to organizational commitment, higher mean scoresrnwere for affective commitment (2.42) followed by Normative Commitment (2.12) andrncontinuance commitment (1.92). This pattern is desirable for organizational commitment.rnTechnical staffs significantly differ in their commitment from administration staff and researchrnstaff and majority of technical staff were continuously committed. Transformational andrntransactional leadership style had significant and positive correlations with affective, normativernand continuance commitment, but not laissez-faire leadership style. The overall scores forrntransformational leadership were slightly less than the suggested score as international average,rnso it is possible to conclude that EIAR leaders are not displaying the ideal levels ofrntransformational leadership behaviors. On the contrary they were demonstrating greater level ofrntransactional and Laissez-faire leadership behaviors. Since both transformational andrntransactional leadership styles showed positive correlations with organizational commitment,rnEIAR leaders are suggested to improve their leadership styles towards more of transformationalrnand transactional leadership style and lessen the laissez-faire leadership style. Most of therntechnical and administration staffs are highly discourage by the inequitable salary scale ofrnbetween researchers and them, so the institute shall put its effort more for balancing the bigrndifference and retain those who are looking outside organizations.rnKey Words: Leadership, Leadership styles, Employee commitment