The word leadership has a special place in our imagination. Leadership engages our values.

When we use the word leadership, we attribute it to something we generally appreciate. Leadership involves out self-images and moral codes. However, we use the world for someone we detested his values. On the one hand, the term leader is used for people like Mandela, Gorbachev, Ataturk, people who are admired for their values. On the other hand, it is used for people, like Pablo Escobar, head of a drug cartel, who are not approved by society. The term leader is used as a value-free term when we use it for a leader of the gang, the mob. Especially in an age of science and mathematics, the word leadership can be used as if it were value-free to describe for ranging phenomena. What about the other side which describe leadership as a value-laden quality. The contradiction between these two situations shapes the quality of leadership we praise, teach, and get. Since it is easier to analyze and examine scholars have studied leadership as a value term. However, the rigor in social science does not require ignoring values; it requires being explicit about values. We cannot construct notions and theories of leadership in a neutral ground because leadership is loaded with emotional content, norms, and value. What is the difference between these two ideas: Leadership means influencing people to fallow the leaders vision and leadership means influencing people to face the problems. At first one everything depends on leader, but for the second one both people and leader are responsible for an outcome. Leader who guides people to solve problems is the basis of this book. This concept builds on culturally dominant views. For example, in politics leadership is generally refers to influencing others as the most influential member of popular movement. In business leaderships is referred to the people who provide vision and influencing in top management position. In military, it refers to the commander who influence rather than coerce his troops to complete a mission. In biology, it refers to the prominent and dominant one. All of these examples show that there are two common factors for leadership: station and influence.

Hidden Values in Theories of Leadership The first theory of leadership trait approach, which examines the personality characteristic of the leader, tries to explain leadership with set of heroic personal talent, skills, and physical characteristics. As Sidney says some men are eventful, while others are event making. Situationalists suggested that times play important role in leadership. Instead of explaining leadership as a common set of traits they suggest that the times make a men leader who has various talents. What a man does while acting as a leader is dependent upon the situation. Contingency theory, synthesize of the trait approach with situationalist view, posits that appropriate leadership is contingent on the requirements of a situation. For instance, when it is appropriate to perform autocratic or democratic behavior depend on the situation. Another field of study, called transactional approach, points that leaders not only influence the followers but also influenced by them. For example, leader benefits from status and influence in exchange for reducing risk. Although each of these theories is viewed to be value-free, they have hidden values. For example, trait approach places value on historymaker who has great influence. The situation approach also place value on historymaker. The mark of a historymaker in history gives us a prospective on greatness. Placing Hitler in the same category with Gandhi does not make a theory value-free, it places value on influence. For the contingency theory the mark of leadership is still influence, control. Transactional approaches also promotes influence as an orienting value, because they state leadership is influence over outcomes. All the approaches introduce value-biases by defining leadership in term of prominence, authority and influence. Theories may be value-free, but they tell us how to think about practice. Trait approach tells that individuals can make difference. Contingency theory tells us what we should do in specific situations. Transactional approach explains that authority is reciprocal.