3.1 Participants Participants were 61 Brazilians and 66 Portuguese. They were professors of secondary schools in Brazil and in Portugal. In Brazil, the participants were professors of a school, located in Pará State, north region of Brazil. In Portugal, the participants were professors of a school, located in Lisbon. It is important to mention that both schools are private organizations. This investigator has chosen professors of secondary schools as samples because these social groups have two important characteristics: they are opinion formers and they also represent a group that transmits cultural values of a society.
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Taking into consideration one of the objectives of this research, that is, to assess the preferred leadership styles from the subordinates’ standpoint, the leader was the Schools’ Principal of the schools and the Professors are the subordinates in each country. As can be observed we used the figure of the Principal as the leader and the Professors as subordinates in order to adapt the five alternatives of The Taxonomy of Leaderships’ Style (Vroom, 2000). This adaptation will be explained in the section Instruments.