Leadership style and Performance of Small and medium size enterprises in Cameroon

In Cameroon, SMEs contribute about 50% of the GDP and accounts for about 92% of businesses (INS, 2009) but about 80% of this SME’s created in Cameroon die before their 5th anniversary with one of the principal causes being the lack of corporate leadership. The main objectives of this research it to show the effects of leadership style on the performance of Cameroonian SMEs. The research follows a Hypothetico- deductive methodology through which primary data was collected through the Multi Factor Leadership Questionnaire which was administered on 114 workers form 38 SMEs in 05 major towns in the southwest region of Cameroon between the period of November 2015 to January 2016, the data was analysed using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the Pearson correlation coefficient and the Ordinary Least Square Multiple Regression(OLS), the SPSS version 20 was used for regression. The Principal results showed that the Transformational Leadership style exerted a positive and significant effect on the performance of SMEs in Cameroon, while the Transactional leadership style exerted a positive and significant impact on performance, this results are in coherence with the results obtained by Bass and Avolio, 2004 in their work entitled “Leadership and Performance beyond Expectations”. This research will therefore propose that in order to achieve organizational performance, managers should use the Transformational alongside with the Transactional leadership style since a combination of the two leadership style will permit the enterprise to attain performance beyond expectations.