The Influence of Values on the Leadership Style

The study of values has been an issue of interest for several subjects, such as philosophy, social sciences, ethics, axiology etc. Despite the fact that psychologists acknowledge the importance of values as orientation tools for every individual in their environment, generating attitudes which translate into behaviours, the empirical research on this topic has been rather scarce, given the complexity of the field, as well as the lack of a sensitive and valid tool able to allow the measurement of values. The academic research, however, cannot avoid an emphasis of (the) values in the study of leadership. Based on the complete leadership model (Bass & Avolio, 1997), the empirical research we propose aims at studying the influence of values on the informal leadership style. The lot of respondents is made up of students, master degree candidates and prisoners from Târgsor, Prahova county prison - totalling 135 persons, divided in 15 groups with one informal leader for each group. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Avolio & Bass), Schwartz Value Inventory and the socio-metric techniques for identifying the informal leaders have been applied to all of them. The proposed hypotheses approach the congruence between the leader's fundamental values and those of the group's members, the way the values influence the leadership in the educational environment (students, master degree candidates) as opposed to the prison environment and, in perspective, the interactions of the members within and outside the group, determined by the degree of identification with the others' values.