The nine items of the Multiple Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) were subjected to a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) using Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS). Principal Component Analysis was performed in order to ascertain whether the nurses were able to distinguish transformational and transactional leadership styles.
Table 2 shows that the cronbach’s α coefficient was 0.82, indicating strong internal consistency and appropriate item homogeneity (11,18). Item total correlation results also revealed acceptable coefficients for all variables (P 1 criteria allowed up to 3 components, but the scree plot identified 2 components to be extracted. For the non-rotated elucidation, two components accounted for 77% of the total variance. After Oblimin rotation, all items showed prominent standardized regression coefficients for one of the two retained Components. Table 2 also shows that all transformational leadership characteristic were loading on component one with a loading range of 0.85-0.94. The unexpected finding was that one of the transactional characteristic, contingent rewards, was loaded to the transformational component with loading of 0.85. All the other transitional leadership characteristics were loaded to transactional components with loading range of 0.42-0.91. This finding indicates that nurses who participated in this study considered contingent reward as a transformational leadership characteristic