Values driven leadership

[From Introduction] Rational/functionalist discourses of leadership focus on what leaders do and offer explanations for the efficacy of their actions. Micro-political discourses offer insights into how leaders negotiate their aims and objectives. Ethical and moral discourses offer explanations for why leaders choose to act in certain ways. Ribbins (1999: 2) points out that values explain the why of the human enterprise. They also offer explanations for why people prefer to resist some directions in which leaders choose to take institutions, whether under pressure from external agencies or of their own volition. These three discourses interact around and through the agency of the leader as person.