Abstract
Research on leadership has been part of organisation behaviour for the last one hundred years and is seen as one of social science's most researched subject (Antonakis, Cianciolo and Sternberg, 2003:5). It is believed that in 1896, the Library of congress in the USA had no book on leadership but in 1981, it had over 5000 entries (Heller, 2001:388). However leadership has interested scholars and the general public for thousand years and leadership as been in the core of research for a very long time, as Bass states: "the study of leadership rivals in age the emergence of civilisation which shaped its leaders as much as it was shaped by them. From its infancy, the study of history has been the study of leaders" (1990a:3). Leadership encompasses many fields as can be seen by the different type of people that are called leaders: From Henry V to George Washington to Lee Iaacocca who produced a dramatic change at Chrysler Corporation to business tycoons such as Robert Maxwell (Fiedler and Garcia, 1987 in Heller, 2001:388). Leaders and consequently leadership exist universally (manifest itself in one form or another across many different national and organisational context, Tirmizi, 2002:269) in every field of study (in both human kind to animal species, Antonakis et al, 2003), is common throughout Western and Easter writing (Bass, 1990) and as such is studied and examined through many different lenses. This is reflected through the large size of the unorganised literature (Smith and Cooper, 1994:3).
