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JMD
40,1 The interaction between
leadership styles and their
followers’ human capital:
74 a correspondence analysis
Received 18 May 2019
Revised 20 March 2020
approach applied to
22 May 2020
20 July 2020
Accepted 12 September 2020
micro-sized businesses
Mohammed Ali Al-Awlaqi
School of Business, Lebanese International University–Yemen Sana’a Campus,
Sana’a, Yemen
Ammar Mohamed Aamer
College of Professional Studies, Northeastern University, Toronto, Canada
Maged Mohammed Barahma
Faculty of Leadership and Management, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia,
Nilai, Malaysia, and
Mohamed Battour
College of Business Administration, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE and
Faculty of Commerce, Tanta University, Tanta, Egypt

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the tendency of leaders to select their followers depending
on their human capital factors such as age, education level, previous working experience and training.
Design/methodology/approach – The participants were 1,388 employees working in a randomly selected
sample of 289 small-sized businesses operating in Yemen. A self-reported questionnaire was used to collect the
data. The correspondence analysis method was used to explore the tendency of leaders to select their followers
depending on their human capital factors.
Findings – We found significant corresponding relationships between leadership styles and the selection
of the followers’ human capital factors. The passive avoidant style was found to select middle-age, long-
experience and fully-trained followers. Transactional style on the other hand was found to select young,
middle-level experience and non-trained followers. The transformational leadership style was found to have no
selection preferences towards any of the human capital factors except for working experience.
Originality/value – Although, some previous studies tried to understand the leaders–followers relationships, no
one investigated the tendency of leaders to select their followers according to their preferences. This study
contributes significantly to the leaders–followers theory by studying the selection process of the leadership style of
their followers’ human capital factors. Understanding this phenomenon could help explain why some leadership
styles are more effective than others, especially in very limited resources contexts such as micro-sized businesses.
Keywords Yemen, Leadership styles, Human capital, Correspondence analysis, Leaders-followers theory,
Micro-sized businesses
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
Journal of Management
Development The importance of studying leadership styles has attracted extensive literature attention due to
Vol. 40 No. 1, 2021
pp. 74-93
their role in inspiring and affecting their followers as a one-directional relationship (Khan et al.,
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0262-1711
2019). Moreover, it was assumed that the relationship should start with the leaders and end with
DOI 10.1108/JMD-05-2019-0172 the followers. This approach was direct, yet any dynamic relationship could be ignored
between leaders and followers. A vast body of literature explored the leadership side theory, but Leadership
the follower side was largely ignored (Ford and Harding, 2015). Such leadership theories styles and
assume that leadership and its characteristics are the primary sources of any prominent effect
or changes in passive followers. In some extreme cases, followers’ roles were utterly denied, and
human capital
they were called “subordinates” (Andersen, 2019). The classic understanding of the leadership
theory is incomplete and should be developed to incorporate a more comprehensive
understanding of relationships.
Understanding the development of the relationship between leaders and followers can 75
enhance the understanding of leadership success. A significant part of the literature
attributes the success to the leaders’ characteristics and ignores the role of the followers. Two
main streams attribute leadership success to leaders’ skills, characteristics and behaviours
(Akers, 2018; Allio, 2018; Caldwell et al., 2017; Longenecker and Mallin, 2019; Nangoli et al.,
2020; Phillips and Phillips, 2020) or leadership styles (Mahmood et al., 2020; Pio and
Lengkong, 2020). The main themes in literature ignored the fact that leaders cannot build
success without getting help from their followers.
Some authors have started to address the relationship between leadership and followers
(DeRue and Ashford, 2010; Du et al., 2019; Marieta et al., 2019), yet limited studies have
focused on micro-sized business. Understanding this phenomenon could help explain why
some leadership styles are more effective than others, especially in the micro-sized businesses
context. Micro-sized business is a unique context with minimal resources and tremendous
challenges. A leader’s behaviour in micro-sized businesses should not be isolated from these
challenges (Aamer et al., 2017; Al-Awlaqi and Aamer, 2020; Megheirkouni and Mejheirkouni,
2020). Due to limited resources in the context of micro-sized businesses, leaders would select
their followers to fit their comfort zones, so there is efficiency in the use of their limited
resources (Johnson, 2018). Attributing leaders’ success in influencing their followers to their
characteristics should incorporate how and why followers embrace leadership actions and
attitudes (Harms et al., 2018). This could be traced to the interaction between leaders and
followers or between followers themselves (Steffens et al., 2018).
The objective of this study is to investigate the interaction between leaders and followers
that creates a supportive atmosphere that could lead to leadership’s success. The interaction
between leaders and followers is considered in this study as multi-directional and dynamic
rather than a one-way and static. This paper is expected to increase our understanding of the
tendency of leaders to select followers depending on their human capital factors such as age,
education level, previous working experience and training. We believe that different
leadership styles exhibit different selection preferences for their followers’ human factors.
Leaders’ comfortable selection of their followers would create a pleasant working zone, which
in turn would help leaders to be more productive and efficient, especially in a minimal
resource’s context such as micro-sized businesses.
This paper is organized as follows: in section 2, we review the literature and develop the
associated hypothesis. In section 3, we describe the methodology, variable measurements and
data analysis. In section 4, we provide a conclusion of this research, combined with theoretical
and managerial implications and suggestions for future research.

2. Literature review
2.1 Human capital
Human capital is defined as a combination of education and labour skills (Østergaard and
Marinova, 2018), or as the knowledge, experience, amount of training and insights that exist
within an individual (Daly et al., 2018). Thus, human capital could be interpreted as the
competencies and skills acquired by individuals through their working experience, education
or training.
JMD Human capital competencies are essential for businesses and their entrepreneurial
40,1 ecosystems (Østergaard and Marinova, 2018). Davidsson and Honig (2003) argued that
human capital could affect the behaviour of individuals and support their entry into nascent
entrepreneurship. Moreover, human capital has been proven to have a positive impact on
radical creativity (Biedenbach et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2018) and it could play a significant role
in a firm’s operational and financial performance to earn more income (Velayutham and
Rahman, 2018). Higher values in human capital factors, such as education, could lead
76 individuals to behave more efficiently and sustainably (Akram et al., 2018; Salehi and
Farzaneh, 2018). Finally, human capital factors, such as gender, education level, work
experience and training, are essential for businesses and could affect and shape the
relationship between leaders and followers and their ability and willingness towards decision
making (Dixon et al., 2016; Zareen et al., 2015). In summary, human capital is vital for all
businesses and key stakeholders.

2.2 Micro-sized businesses

Micro-sized businesses are a very small type of companies that usually have less than nine
employees (Osakwe and Anaza, 2018). Although micro-sized businesses are important as a
main source of employment, they received less attention in the literature compared to the
other types of businesses, such as medium and large businesses (Al-Awlaqi et al., 2018;
Osakwe and Anaza, 2018). Micro-sized businesses usually develop an informal form of
leadership (Indarti, 2018). The founder of these types of businesses plays the primary role
in decision making and considered as the centre of their competitive advantage (Danvila-
del-Valle et al., 2018; Hutchinson, 2018a). Thus, the founders of the micro-sized businesses
inevitably become the leaders of the businesses.
Besides, the development of leadership in micro-sized businesses is connected to the
challenges faced by this type of business (Megheirkouni and Mejheirkouni, 2020). Micro-sized
businesses are very vulnerable due to their limited resources (Osakwe, 2019). Thus, micro-
sized business leaders would select their followers comfortably in a way that helps them
manage these limited resources in a more efficient manner (Johnson, 2018). In summary,
leadership selection of their followers is an important issue, especially in a minimal resource
context such as micro-sized businesses.

2.3 Leadership styles

Many approaches in the literature sought to understand and categorize leadership styles. The
first approach focuses on leadership task orientation and introduces two styles: task-oriented
and interpersonally oriented (Zhao et al., 2016). The second approach focuses on leadership
decision-making processes and introduces two types of leadership styles: democratic and
autocratic. The third approach focuses on how leaders manage their relationships with their
followers and adds three types of leadership styles: transformational, transactional and
passive avoidant (Hill and Bartol, 2015).
From the perspective of understanding the relationship between leaders’ style and its effect
on their followers, there are significantly positive and negative trends in the literature. Some
argued that a leader’s stress influences behaviour (Harms et al., 2017), while others state that
leadership styles’ effectiveness is not supported in the case of high socio-economic challenging
circumstances (Berkovich, 2018) and could be effective only in the existence of other variables,
such as goal clarity (Raziq et al., 2018; Sudha et al., 2016). Furthermore, other studies connected
adverse effects to some leadership styles, such as the avoidant passive, narcissistic and
transactional types (Cheung et al., 2017; Gong et al., 2018; Nazarian et al., 2017).
Leadership styles can have a positive impact on the development and use of
organizational learning and commitment (Ebrahim and Yahaya, 2016), job and meeting
satisfaction (Abdelhafiz et al., 2016), organization subordinates’ performance (Kwanya and Leadership
Stilwell, 2018; Nazarian et al., 2017; Sethibe, 2017), followers’ innovative behaviour (Ahmed styles and
et al., 2018; Gong et al., 2018; Hansen and Pihl-Thingvad, 2019), work engagement and
commitment (Ribeiro et al., 2018), risk-taking, decision-making participation and
human capital
empowerment (Huertas-Valdivia et al., 2019), career readiness (Villarreal et al., 2018),
positive working environment (Mills et al., 2018), total quality management practices (Kumar
and Sharma, 2018; Soliman, 2018) and building followers’ trust (Yasir et al., 2016).
Leadership styles can also vary an effect on followers’ outcomes, such as job satisfaction, 77
satisfaction and effectiveness with the leader and task performance. This could be due to the
pre-selection process imposed by leaders (Banks et al., 2016). The variation in the impact of
leadership could also be due to the surrounding factors, context or economic climate (Maak
et al., 2016). The attempts of leaders to enhance their effect by propagating their behaviour
among followers can often result in creating their own style culture (Liden et al., 2013).
Leadership can also be explained as a reciprocal social interaction with followers (DeRue and
Ashford, 2010), that is not enforced from top to bottom by hierarchical positions in an
organization. Relationships between individuals could determine who leads and who follows.
However, reciprocal relationships between leaders and followers are not relevant in the context
of micro-sized businesses, which start with one leader who is unaffected by the influence of his/
her followers. In micro-sized or small-sized businesses, this relationship is somewhat one-
dimensional and static (Hutchinson, 2018b). In micro-sized businesses, the creation of a leader
entity is not as important as the mechanism of the followers’ selection process.
Vogel (2017) discussed the importance of the interaction between leaders and followers in
developing organizational culture and determining how employees fit in this culture. Others
argued that followers’ preferences that match leaders’ practices are the most critical factors
that affect employee performance (Ag Budin and Wafa, 2015). Moreover, leaders were found
to change their behaviours best to fit their followers (Northouse, 2018). Thus, we can conclude
that the relationship between leaders/followers is mutually beneficial, and leadership styles
can have a higher impact when it matches follower needs (Tepper et al., 2018). We propose
that leaders could exert more influence on their followers if they select those most suitable for
their leadership characteristics and their understanding of the context (Ndalamba et al., 2018).
Thus, we emphasize the idea that leaders choose their followers to best suit their behaviours.
This gap has not been studied yet. Therefore, in our current study, we argue that leaders
match their leadership styles with their followers’ perceptions by selecting and recruiting the
most suitable personnel to suit their leadership style characteristics.
Based on the previous discussion, the research question of this study is formulated as
follows:
RQ1. Which human capital factors do leaders look for when they choose their followers
in micro-sized businesses?

3. Methodology
Correspondence analysis (CA) is an exploratory technique that aims to scale the row and
column categories of a contingency table in a low-dimensional space (Mair, 2018). The CA
utilizes the inputs to estimate concurrently separate category dimensions for visualization
(Chernyak-Hai et al., 2018).
The CA was selected in this study for several reasons. First, the CA is very useful due to its
ability to show tabular data graphically. Second, this study is exploratory in nature; thus, the
strength of the corresponding analysis to visualize data would facilitate analysis and the
discovery of the most pertinent themes and relationships found in the data (Greenacre, 2017).
Finally, the CA is very effective in analysing categorical and ordinal data. It minimizes the
JMD distortion of data made by other analytical techniques when they transform categorical and
40,1 ordinal data into a scale form of data. Thus, CA was found to be the most appropriate
technique to analyse the data of this study. As mentioned before, CA is a prevalent technique
yet used in very few leadership studies. For example, the CA was used to study the
relationship between the tier of the department and the leadership (Kok and McDonald, 2017).
Moreover, CA was used to assess primary schools’ teacher leadership in outdoor education
(Hovardas, 2016) and to determine the tactical leader of a sports team (Sasaki et al., 2017).
78 Assuming X is a categorical data matrix with n rows and p columns found in the
contingency table, then each row category of X is a point in p-dimensional space, and each
column category of X is a point in n-dimensional space. For example, if we want to study the
preferences of gender on two leading commercial brands: A and B. In this case, the columns of
this matrix would have two categories of gender (male and female) while the rows would have
two categories (A and B). This matrix would have 2 3 2-dimensional space. Asking, for
example, ten respondents about their favourite commercial brand would create a matrix of
2 3 2 cells filled with some frequencies. The frequencies in the cells of the contingency table
do not represent any meaningful distances between the row and the column category points.
Thus, the CA transforms the frequencies
into proportions by dividing all elements of X by the
xij
total of all numbers in X P ¼ fpij g ¼ x:: . Each frequency in the four cells of our example
will be divided by the total number of respondents of 10. The CA then computes the totals of
‘
the rows and columns in the vectors r and c, where r ¼ P 3 1; and c ¼ P 3 1, where 1 is a
vector of ones. In our example, gender’s totals would have two values, and brands’ totals
would also have two values. Thus, r would be a vector of 2 3 1, and the c would be a vector
of 2 3 1.
Square roots of r and c are then calculated and converted into diagonal matrices, as well as
the inverse of the resulting matrices, Dr ¼ ½diagðrÞ−1=2 and Dc ¼ ½diagðcÞ−1=2. This step
called proximity analysis, where each cell’s frequency is divided by the geometric mean of the
total of the corresponding column and row. From the previous step with the scaled matrix A is
calculated as A ¼ Dr PDc and the singular value decomposition of A 5 <B, W, C ≥ SVD(A) is
constructed. From the previous components, the coordinate matrices F and G are computed
as F 5 DrBW and G 5 DcCW’. Eigenvalues, V is calculated as V5WW’. The transformed
matrix removes the effect of the row and column levels. In this step, the CA minimizes the
residual distances orthogonally to a centroid and calculates an eigenvalue as a centre of the
solution at the origin (centroid).
The most important step then is the computation of the row distance di and the column
distance dj:
X 1 pij 2
di ¼  pj
j
pj pi

X 1 pij 2
dj ¼  pi
i
pi pj

Statistics in the CA are computed as follows: (1) Mass 5 wi, where the weights wi and wj are
computed from the vectors r and c, such as wi fri g and wj fcj g, distance 5 di2, row factor fij,
f2 g2 wi fij2
column factor gij, row correlation 5 dij2 , column correlation dij2, row contribution 5 vi , column
i j
wj gij2
contribution 5 vj .
The distances between points are determined using eigenvalues as
the distance from the origin and the eigenvectors as the direction relative to the origin.
The distance between any two points could be calculated as the third line in a triangle as the Leadership
two other lines, and the angle between them are known. styles and
Instead of having a matrix of uninformative frequencies between two categorical
variables, the CA utilizes our intuitive sense of physical distance and visualize the gaps
human capital
between the levels of these two variables. The distances will show how far apart the two
variables levels are. The closer the distance between any two levels, the stronger the
relationship between them. In our example, if the male level shows closer distance to brand A,
this means males prefer brand A more than brand B. This would be an easy and efficient way 79
to measure the association between the levels of two categorical variables.

3.1 The context and the sample of the study

The data was collected using a survey distributed to 1,000 randomly selected small-sized
businesses operating in Yemen by 96 surveyors. We found that: (1) 309 businesses went out of
business, (2) 226 businesses were displaced and (3) 109 businesses refused to respond. Thus,
the remaining 356 firms formed our sample size. During the data entry process, we also lost 39
surveys due to missing data. Therefore, our final sample size was 289 firms, with 1,388 total
employees. Our sample consisted of 12.6% females, 87.4% males, 39.8% from the product
industry and 60.2% from the services industry. Our sample reflected an almost total
representation of the small business industry in Yemen as it included all main cities and was
distributed by 35.6% from the capital Sana’a, 15.5% from the second largest city Taiz, 10.7%
from Hudaidah, 10% from Hadramout, 5.2% from Ibb, 8% from Aden and 15% from other
places. The small business type was selected as the main targeted population because we
found a direct relationship between employee recruitment/selection and the leader/owner of
the business.

3.2 Human capital measurement

Human capital can be measured using many factors (Biedenbach et al., 2018; Daly et al., 2018;
Wang et al., 2018): (1) age is measured by the number of years since the time of birth;
(2) Gender was measured by a dichotomous variable which takes 0 for male and 1 for female;
(3) education level was measured by an ordinal variable that uses 0 for primary school, 1 for
secondary school, 2 for undergraduate level, 3 for graduate-level; (4) work experience was
measured by the years of employment; (5) training was measured as an integer variable of the
number of management courses or workshops taken by the employee.

3.3 Leadership styles measurement

Many leadership styles have been discovered and studied, such as pragmatic, servant,
authentic, ethical and spiritual styles (Anderson and Sun, 2017); empowering, paradoxical
and servant styles (Huertas-Valdivia et al., 2019); and paternalistic, democratic and authentic
leadership styles (Ahmed et al., 2018). Although these styles were evident in our study, we
discovered that the majority of the studies used the most popular leadership styles of
transformational, transactional and passive avoidant (Berkovich, 2018; Cheung et al., 2017;
Kumar and Sharma, 2018; Mills et al., 2018; Nazarian et al., 2017; Ricard et al., 2017; Soliman,
2018; Yang, 2015; Zhang et al., 2018). Overall, although many leadership styles other
than transformational, transactional and passive avoidant have been used, these are not
pervasive.
We searched the literature for the most used comprehensive and representative
measurements for leadership styles. We found that the most prominent and used
measurement tool is the Multifactor leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) (G€ unzel-Jensen et al.,
2018; Mills et al., 2018; Vignoli et al., 2018; Villarreal et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2018) with 45
questions using a 5-point Likert scale from 0 (not at all to 5 (always).
JMD 3.4 Controls variables
40,1 The most important control factors found in the literature that could have a potential
confounding effect were the gender, age and education level of the leader (Abdelhafiz et al.,
2016; Berkovich, 2018; Cheung et al., 2017; G€ unzel-Jensen et al., 2018; Huertas-Valdivia et al.,
2019; Nazarian et al., 2017; Hansen and Pihl-Thingvad, 2019; Raziq et al., 2018; Ribeiro et al.,
2018; Villarreal et al., 2018; Yasir et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2018). Thus, we have chosen to
control for the gender, age and education level of the leader.
80

4. Data
4.1 Self-reporting bias
To mitigate self-reporting bias, the leader and the followers were given a chance to evaluate
the leadership style that dominated in their working space. We used Cohen’s Kappa criterion
to compare answers (Fleiss et al., 2003) on the aggregate final score. No self-reporting
problems were found, as shown in Table 1.

4.2 Study instrument

The instrument of the study underwent a double linguistic translation process: it was
translated from English to Arabic by a certified English-Arabic translator, and then the
Arabic version was translated back to English by another certified translator. We compared
the two English versions and found no discrepancies. The Arabic version was checked by a
specialist who holds a doctoral degree in Arabic literature. He described the instrument as
clear, easy and understandable.

5. Data analysis
In terms of descriptive statistics and demographics, our sample consisted of 1,388 employees
(12.6% females, 87.4% males), 39.8% of whom were from the product industry and 60.2%
from the services industry. In terms of age, 46.0% were between 31–50 years, 52.3% were less
than 30 years and only 1.7 % more than 50 years. Also, 7.7% had primary school level
education, 23.1% had secondary school level, 54.3% had university or undergraduate level
and 14.9% had graduate level. Moreover, 9.8% of the respondents reported less than five
years of experience, 70.8% between 5 and 10 years of experience and 19.4% had more than
ten years of experience. For training, 47.8% had no courses or workshops, while 52.2 %
claimed they had completed some. On the leadership side, most leaders (39%) exhibited an
avoidant style, 35.7% showed transactional style characteristics, while only 25.3% showed
transformational leadership characteristics.
Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted on the transformational, transactional
and passive-avoidant styles. These are latent variables because it is not possible to measure
them directly. Thus, these three latent variables were measured using sets of measured
questions. The transformational style was measured with 20 questions, transactional was
measured with eight questions and the passive avoidant was measured with eight questions.

MLQ leadership style items Cohen’s Kappa Interpretation Approximate significance

Table 1. Transformational leadership style 0.32 Fair 0.043**

Cohen’s Kappa raters Transactional leadership style 0.56 Moderate 0.000***
agreement analysis of Passive avoidant leadership style 0.28 Fair 0.031**
leadership styles Note(s): Significance level: p < 0.001 “***” p < 0.01 “**” p < 0.05 “*”
These questions were taken from the multifactor leadership questionnaire (MLQ), as Leadership
explained in the measurement section. To ensure that each question significantly contributes styles and
to its style measurement, we used CFA loading scores (Table 2). Each loading score should be
more than 0.6 to be considered as good or significant otherwise, it has a poor loading
human capital
(Chatfield and Collins, 2018) and should be discarded from the analysis. As a result, five
questions were deleted from the transformational scale, two questions were eliminated from
the transactional leadership scale and two questions were deleted from the passive-avoidant
leadership scale. The groups of questions that measure the three leadership styles are shown 81
in Table 2, with their loading scores for each component.

Componentsa
Leadership style 1 2 3

Transformational
Item1 0.629
Item2 0.646
Item3 0.623
Item4 0.617
Item5 0.667
Item6 0.607
Item7 0.616
Item8 0.601
Item9 0.568
Item10 0.608
Item11 0.603
Item12 0.548
Item13 0.589
Item14 0.544
Item15 0.608
Item16 0.582
Item17 0.609
Item18 0.652
Item19 0.628
Item20 0.605
Transactional
Item1 0.645
Item2 0.645
Item3 0.597
Item4 0.573
Item5 0.607
Item6 0.676
Item7 0.632
Item8 0.647
Passive avoidant
Item1 0.582
Item2 0.644
Item3 0.630
Item4 0.610
Item5 0.628
Item6 0.647
Item7 0.632 Table 2.
Item8 0.583 Factor analysis of MQL
Note(s): Components extracted form fixed number of factors 5 1 using principles component method with no
a
measurement
rotation questions
JMD 5.1 Common method bias
40,1 We used the Harman one-factor test to determine if there was any common method bias that
threatened the validity of our results (Fuller et al., 2016). In this test, we ran the explanatory
factor analysis over the full set of our questionnaire items. Table 3 shows that only 20.15% of
the variance is explained by one theoretical factor, which is less than the variance threshold of
50%. Thus, we can conclude that we have no significant issues with common method bias in
our study.
82
5.2 Unidimensional, discriminant validity and convergent validity
We employed exploratory factor analysis to test the scales and their structures. The
Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) test, along with Bartlett’s test of sphericity, provided strong
evidence of the suitability of factor analysis (Table 4). The EFA showed factor loading from
0.68 to 0.60 for transformational leadership, from 0.70 to 0.64 for transactional style and from
0.67 to 0.64 for passive avoidant style. Moreover, all the EFA analyses for each construct were
suggested to have only one component. Furthermore, the average variance explained for all
of the three constructs exceeded the recommended value of 0.5 (Hair et al., 2019). In summary,
we saw no significant violation of the unidimensionality, discriminant validity or convergent
validity.

Total variance explained

Initial eigenvalues Extraction sums of squared loadings
Factor Total % of variance Cumulative % Total % of variance Cumulative %

1 6.101 22.597 22.597 5.442 20.154 20.154

2 2.695 9.980 32.577
3 2.496 9.243 41.820
4 1.030 3.814 45.633
5 0.984 3.643 49.276
6 0.938 3.472 52.748
7 0.867 3.210 55.958
8 0.846 3.133 59.091
9 0.834 3.091 62.182
10 0.790 2.928 65.109
11 0.765 2.834 67.944
12 0.733 2.714 70.657
13 0.706 2.615 73.273
14 0.689 2.553 75.826
15 0.619 2.291 78.117
16 0.604 2.238 80.355
17 0.586 2.172 82.527
18 0.581 2.151 84.678
19 0.548 2.028 86.706
20 0.519 1.921 88.628
21 0.513 1.899 90.527
22 0.490 1.815 92.342
23 0.478 1.769 94.111
24 0.448 1.660 95.771
Table 3. 25 0.407 1.508 97.280
Total variance 26 0.371 1.374 98.653
explained of the one- 27 0.364 1.347 100.000
factor Herman test Note(s): Extraction Method: Principal Axis Factoring
 Before our main CA, we conducted a preliminary analysis using different control Leadership
variables. We found that the leader’s gender was not an important factor because the styles and
percentage of female leaders was only 4.61%, and it would not affect our findings even if it
were omitted. We ran an analysis separately for each control variable alone, but we found no
human capital
significant differences between these different analyses.

5.3 The CA results 83

We started our analysis by determining the correspondence relationship between leadership
styles and the age categories of the followers. The results showed a significant relationship
between leadership styles and the age categories of the followers as χ 2 (4, n 5 1,388) 5 10.58,
p 5 0.032 (Table 5). Table 5 and Figure 1 show that the passive avoidant style tends to hire
from the middle-age group, as that style scored 0.216 and 0.151 on the two dimensions, and
the middle-age group scored 0.285 and 0.069. Moreover, a young group of followers was more
common with transactional style, as it scored (0.213, 0.092), which was the closest score to
the transitional style with (0.389, 0.000). The age of the followers’ group seemed to be the
least relevant to any of the leadership style, with a score in dimensions of (1.181, 0.982).
Moreover, the transformational style was found to have no selection preferences for any age
groups, as it scored (0.217, 0.232).
Passive avoidant, transformational and transactional leadership styles were assessed for
any interaction with age. The CA measures the association between any two categories
according to the distance between them. A short distance indicates a strong association, while
a greater distance indicates less or no association between any two categories.
Figure 1 shows that the distance between the passive avoidant style point and the middle-
age point is the shortest one. This indicates that passive avoidant leaders prefer to hire
middle-aged followers in the context of micro-sized businesses. The second shortest distance
was between the transactional style point and the young point. Again, this indicates that
transactional leaders tend to hire young followers in the context of micro-sized businesses.
On the other hand, transformational style is not associated with age. Moreover, none of the
three leadership styles tend to hire older followers in the context of micro-sized businesses.
The second human capital we analysed was working experience. The results showed a
significant relationship between leadership styles and the working experience of the
followers, as χ 2 (4, n 5 1,388; 5 10.17, p 5 0.038). The analysis of the working experience
showed that passive avoidant style tends to hire followers with more than ten years of
experience. Passive avoidant style scored (0.164, 0.234) on the two dimensions,
respectively, and the category of more than ten years scored the closest scores of (0.410,
0.290). The transactional style showed significant convergence toward hiring followers
with moderate experience of 5–10 years. The transactional style and category of this
experience scored (0.358, 0.03) and (0.173, 0.004) on the two dimensions, respectively. On the
other hand, we found that transformational leaders tend to hire the least experienced
followers with less than five years. The transformational leadership style and the less than
five years category scored (0.253, 0.308) and (0.437, 0.548) on the two dimensions,
respectively. The summary of these results is shown in Table 5 and Figure 2.

Leadership style constructs KMO Chi-square Sig Average variance explained Table 4.
KMO and Bartlett’s
Transformational 0.938 6467.52 0.000 58.3 test for the three
Transactional 0.807 1,460.75 0.000 51.1 leadership styles
Passive avoidant 0.802 1,359.36 0.000 50.8 constructs
JMD Score in dimension
40,1 Factors Mass 1 2

Age
Young 0.523 0.213 0.092
Middle-age 0.460 0.285 0.069
Aged 0.017 1.181 0.982
84 Active total 1.000
Transformational style 0.253 0.217 0.232
Transactional style 0.357 0.389 0.000
Passive avoidant style 0.390 0.216 0.151
Active total 1.000
Working experience
Less than 5 years 0.098 0.437 0.548
From 5 to 10 years 0.708 0.173 0.004
More than 10 years 0.194 0.410 0.290
Active total 1.000
Transformational style 0.253 0.253 0.308
Transactional style 0.357 0.358 0.037
Passive avoidant style 0.390 0.164 0.234
Active total 1.000
Education level
Primary school 0.077 0.167 0.577
Secondary school 0.231 0.467 0.085
Undergraduate level 0.543 0.220 0.013
Graduate level 0.149 0.008 0.119
Active total 1.000
Transformational style 0.253 0.261 0.249
Transactional style 0.357 0.374 0.028
Passive avoidant style 0.390 0.174 0.187
Active total 1.000
Training
No previous training 0.478 0.271
Trained 0.522 0.249
Active total 1.000
Transformational style 0.253 0.200
Table 5. Transactional style 0.357 0.213
Corresponding Passive avoidant style 0.390 0.325
analysis results Active total 1.000

Figure 2 represents leadership styles as transformational, transactional and passive avoidant

while the followers’ previous experience is described as less than five years, from 5 to 10 years
and more than ten years. The CA shows that the passive avoidant style point is very close to
the more than ten years point, indicating such leaders tend to hire higher experienced
followers with more than ten years of experience in the micro-sized business context.
Moreover, the transactional style point is very close to the position for 5–10 years.
Accordingly, this indicates that transactional leaders tend to hire followers with a moderate
level of previous experience in the micro-sized business context. Finally, the transformational
style shows very close distance to the experience of less than five years, indicating that
transformation leaders prefer to hire less experienced followers in the micro-sized business
context.
Our analysis was extended to test the relationship between education level and leadership
styles. The results showed an insignificant relationship as χ 2 (6, N 5 1,388) 5 9.853, p 5 0.131.
 Row and Column Points Leadership
1.5
Symmetrical Normalization
Age
styles and
Leadership human capital
aged
1.0

0.5 85
Dimension 2

Passive avoidant sty

Transactional style
0.0 Middle-age
Young Transformational sty

–0.5

Figure 1.
–1.0 Graphical presentation
of the correspondence
analysis between the
–1.5 age of the followers and
–1.5 –1.0 –0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 the leadership styles
Dimension 1

Row and Column Points

Symmetrical Normalization
0.6 Less than 5 years Leadership
Working experience

0.4
Transformational sty

0.2
Dimension 2

Transactional style
0.0000
From 5 to 10 years

–0.2 Passive avoidant sty

More than 10 years Figure 2.
Graphical presentation
–0.4 of the correspondence
analysis between the
working experience of
–0.6 the followers and the
–0.6 –0.4 –0.2 0.0000 0.2 0.4 0.6 leadership styles
Dimension 1

The insignificance of this relationship came from the fact that transformational and passive
avoidant styles had no major selection preferences for their followers’ education levels.
However, the transactional leadership style showed a strong preference for low levels of
education, specifically secondary school. The transactional styles scored (0.357, 0.374) on
the two proposed dimensions while secondary level education scored (0.231, 0.467) on the
same dimensions. The results are shown in Table 5 and Figure 3.
Figure 3 shows a different pattern in the CA results than those found in Figures 1 and 2.
In this figure, we can see only a close distance between the transactional style point and the
secondary school point. This indicates that transactional leaders tend to hire less educated
JMD Row and Column Points

40,1 0.75
Symmetrical Normalization
Education
Leadership
Primary school

0.50

86
Dimension 2
0.25
Passive avoidant sty

Transactional style Undergraduate level

0.00
Graduate level
Secondary school
Figure 3. Transformational sty
Graphical presentation –0.25
of the correspondence
analysis between the
education level of the
followers and the –0.50
leadership styles –0.50 –0.25 0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75
Dimension 1

followers who have secondary school level of education. The other two educational levels do
not show any close distances with leadership style points. Graduate-level points are almost at
the same distance from all other leadership style points. Moreover, the undergraduate level
point is at the same distance from the passive avoidant style point and the transformation
style point. Thus, we cannot conclude any tendencies for passive avoidant and
transformation leaders towards hiring followers with any specific education level in the
micro-sized business context. An interesting finding is the very low level of primary school
education point, which was far from all the leadership style points. Thus, we can conclude
that no leaders want to hire any followers with a very low level of education in their
micro-sized business context.
The status of whether a follower received previous business training was the last human
capital factor tested in our study. The results showed a significant relationship between
leadership styles and the status of training as χ 2 (2, N 5 1,388) 5 6.317, p 5 0.042. The
analysis showed that passive avoidant style sought ready-trained followers, as it scored 0.325
on the dimension, and the trained status of followers scored 0.249. Transactional leadership
styles seemed to have hiring preferences for non-trained followers as they scored 0.213 and
0.271, respectively. Transformational leaders showed less attraction to hire non-trained
followers, but this result could not be confirmed, as it scored 0.200. Thus, transformational
leadership was considered the nearest style to the non-trained status of the followers.
See Table 5 for more details.

6. Conclusion and implications

We believe that different leaders have different selection criteria for their followers’ human
capital factors. Understanding this phenomenon could help explain why some leadership
styles are more effective than others, especially in very limited resources contexts such as
micro-sized businesses where leaders select their followers to fit their comfort zones to be
efficient and effective in utilizing these limited resources (Johnson, 2018).
The CA results provide evidence of a significant correspondence relationship between the
age of the followers and leadership styles. The passive avoidant leadership was found to
select middle-aged followers, while transactional leadership styles hired more young Leadership
followers than others. Moreover, the employees’ previous work experience was found to have styles and
a significant correspondence relationship with leadership styles. The passive avoidant styles
selected followers with more working experience while transactional leadership styles
human capital
selected followers with a middle level of experience. On the other hand, transformational
leadership styles tended to select the least experienced followers. We extended our analysis to
include more human capital in our study, such as educational level. Surprisingly, we found no
significant relationship between education level and leadership styles. This overall 87
insignificant result came from the fact that transformational and passive avoidant
leadership styles had no distinct selection criteria for the education level of their followers,
and the transactional leadership style was the only one to show a tendency to select followers
with a low level of education. In addition to that, we analysed the correspondence relationship
between leadership styles and the training status of followers and found a significant
relationship. Our analysis revealed that passive avoidant styles looked for ready-trained
followers. Unexpectedly, transactional leadership styles looked for non-trained followers,
while the transformational leadership style was found to have no clear selection criteria
towards trained or non-trained followers.
In summary, leaders’ styles affected employee selection criteria in the micro-sized
business context. Transformational, transactional and passive avoidant styles had different
recruitment preferences for age, previous working experience and prior training but not for
the education levels of their followers.

6.1 Implications of the study

This study contributes to the theoretical development of the leaders–followers theory by
providing insights into the relationship between leaders and followers. It investigates the
different selection criteria of leaders in selecting their followers according to human capital
factors. This contribution would play a role in further developing the leaders–followers
theory.
This study provides a practical opportunity for entrepreneurs and the leaders of micro-
sized businesses to understand exactly how they choose the primary human capital factors
that suit their leadership styles. We have shown that leadership styles have some recruitment
preferences towards what human capital factors work best for them. The creation of this
comfortable zone of work for each leadership style could help micro-sized businesses to
survive and perform better. This study also showed that older employees are not suitable for
any type of new micro-enterprise. This could be because micro-sized organizations are
labour-intensive. Thus, older employees should target medium and large varieties of
businesses. Moreover, this study showed that leaders of micro-sized businesses have no
selection preferences for their followers’ education levels. This could be attributed to the very
simple technologies used in this type of business.
In another direction, micro-sized businesses are linked to microfinance institutions as
microfinance institutions are considered the primary source of funds and support for the
micro-sized businesses (Al-Awlaqi and Aamer, 2019). Thus, microfinance institutions should
integrate leadership in their financial and managerial training programs. This would help the
founders to select the best combination of human capital requirements to gain more harmony
with their employees. Microfinance institutions should offer these training courses to their
customers and non-customers as they have a wide variety of social and development
objectives to enhance the micro-sized businesses’ survival.
Power distance and collectivism are the most critical cultural dimensions that could affect
leaders–followers’ relationships. Thus, the implication of this study could be generalized and
applied in different cultural settings. This study applies to any other high-power distance
JMD cultures such as Malaysia, Mexico and the Philippines. Moreover, this study could be applied
40,1 to the micro-sized businesses in the MENA region as they have the same collectivist culture
as Yemen.
Although our study was conducted on micro-sized businesses, the findings could be
applied to other types of businesses. Human resource departments in medium and large
companies could create new recruitment rules that suit their leadership styles well. Usually,
companies set very high levels of human capital requirements, such as an age ceiling level,
88 work experience minimum level and specific training levels without linking these to their
leaders’ needs. Setting high standards of human capital requirements is not always the best
choice. Human resource managers should think about how to set the most suitable human
capital requirement for their leadership styles. Thus, setting low levels of human capital
requirements could be beneficial for their companies and increase the consistency of
communication between leaders and followers. In general, we argued that the maximum level
of human capital requirements is not always the best choice for any business. Instead, the
most appropriate level for their leadership style should be given the opportunity for selection.

6.2 Future research

This study expands the limited knowledge on the relationship between leadership and
followers as multi-directional and dynamic rather than one-way and static. Future research
could enhance the current results by replicating the same study with medium and large
companies. This could open the door for further investigation of the leadership-follower
selection process. Moreover, more studies should be conducted to discover non-human capital
factors, such as teamwork and social interaction factors, and how the leadership style’s
selection process would be put in place. Future research should investigate how followers’
selection and interaction processes could enhance or hinder leadership performance, and
examine how the leaders’ self-motivated selection of their followers could impact their
leadership performance. Furthermore, more studies could discuss the effect of human capital
factors on the peer-to-peer relationship between followers and how this could affect the
relationship with their leadership.

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Corresponding author
Mohammed Ali Al-Awlaqi can be contacted at: alzooka@gmail.com

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