Leadership Styles in Small and Medium Sized Business: Evidence from Macedonian Textile SMEs

Abstract

Since leaders can have a strong influence on the employees’ behavior, various approaches have been designed to determine the most effective style of leadership. As a field of study, the review of past research reveals that investigating leadership styles has been mainly focused on large businesses. Despite the great importance of leadership to SMEs, not many studies attempted to explore the leadership style embraced by SMEs, especially within the Macedonian context. The purpose of this study is to explore the presence of different leadership styles (autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire) in Macedonian SME. Moreover, in view of the main research objective, several demographic variables were examined, such as gender, age and working experience as to their relevance for the dominant leadership style, with a special focus on managers of small and medium sized businesses from the textile industry. Using a Leadership Style Questionnaire, the research measured different leadership styles in addition to collecting in-depth demographic data on each of the respondents. The research results have indicated that the democratic leadership is the dominant style of Macedonian textile SMEs.