Charismatic female leadership: an adoptable leadership model for sustainable SMEs in Nigeria

Gender discrimination, weaker sex stigmatisation, and a lack of career advancement and
training opportunities have all been and continue to be recurring decimals in Nigerian
enterprises. Although the National Bureau of Statistics (NBC) reports that women made up
50% of the Nigerian population in 2017, only about 21% of registered entrepreneurial
businesses in Nigeria are run by women. Having said that, Nigeria's small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs) continue to face the difficult fate of unsustainability. This has been
attributed to poor leadership or, at the very least, the choice and use of an ineffective
leadership style. Currently, studies have investigated various leadership styles, such as
Transactional, Transformational, Coercive, Charismatic, and Full range leadership styles, but
none has highlighted or suggested which one is thought to be the most effective and would
support the sustainability of SMEs in Nigeria. This study aims to examine how women
leadership impact on SMEs and to suggest an adoptable leadership model for SME
sustainability in Nigeria. This is achieved by investigating the impact of various leadership
models on the sustainability of SMEs in Nigeria.
To achieve this, a mixed research method of combining both quantitative and qualitative
approach with a view to achieving a holistic, well-balanced, and objective research project
was adopted. Quantitative data for this study comprised of data got from a tailored research
questionnaire. Nonprobability convenience sampling method was adopted, 231 responses
were received from the research questionnaire. To analyse the data gathered from quantitative
survey, the SPSS was used. The qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to fill gaps
in the quantitative study data questionnaire by providing participants' more detailed personal
experiences and opinions. Through convenience sampling, 17 people were chosen from the general population to participate in face-to-face semi-structured interviews with open-ended
questions and the data was analysed using the NVIVO software. Data was presented in the
form of charts and frequency distribution tables, along with the corresponding percentages.
To test the causality relationship in accordance with the study's hypotheses, the Pearson
Correlation Coefficient was used. The goal was to examine the inter-variable correlation and
describe the strength and direction of the relationship between variables.
Overall, the findings of all studies suggested that embracing female leadership could improve
the sustainability of SMEs in Nigeria, and charismatic leadership was found to be more
effective in Nigeria than other leadership styles.