In the current age of competitiveness and progress, organizations largely focus on achieving objectives by following a beneficial system that is capable of running entities. Leadership behaviour is a modern concept, which is considered to impact the intellectual growth and performance of employees. In higher education institutions, it is important to increase employee performance in order to achieve sustainability in the education sector. The current study aims to investigate the effect of the leadership behaviour and style on the employee performance of the Iraqi universities. Following the transformational and transactional theories, the study proposes a conceptual framework to investigate the influence of transformational and transactional leadership of the administrators on academic employee performance the indicators of which are teaching, research and services to the university.