Previous research in the area of leadership and stress has shown that the leader plays an important role but in what way is still an issue to explore. A qualitative approach was used in this study to develop an increased understanding of the leader's experience of stress using four themes; leadership, stress, control and organizational factors. A total of 12 semi-structured and un-structured interviews were carried out with 6 leaders, three females and three males. The data was transcribed and thematic as well as narrative analysis was conducted.The results indicates that leadership stress is caused by a lack of control and that factors intrinsic to the role as a leader both facilitates and complicates the leaders situation when facing stress..

There is a common belief that the arts contain knowledge of creativity that can enrich the business world. Similarly, the arts are in need of additional support from the private sector and know-how of business practices. In short, there is a need for mutual understanding. With my background as a dancer paired with my studies at the Stockholm School of Economics I have taken the challenge of bringing the two worlds closer together. By changing a social system, like an organization, it is possible to get a better understanding of it.

This thesis investigates the dynamics of the relationship between a leader and the followers within a chosen organization. The research on leadership has generally been focused on the leader, and consequently treating the followers like passive subordinates. We pursue a more multidimensional view of the subject, meaning that leadership descends from an interaction between leaders and followers, which makes it relevant to study the dynamics of the relationship from both perspectives. We chose to do a qualitative case study on a middle- and preschool which has won a price for being an ideal place to work at. This price peaked our interest to investigate why the relationships are highly functional in this particular organization.

Lean Production is used by many manufacturing companies. Companies in process industries do not use Lean Production to the same extent today. This is part of the report's issue to explore how Lean Production can be applied to a company in the process industries.The investigated company is a processing company that manufactures various types of foil. The company wishes to streamline its production and has therefore asked the authors to examine if Lean Production can offer the company improvements in their production. Lean Production value stream mapping tool has been selected to identify and analyze the current state of two of its products in production.

AbstractThe aim of the present study was to investigate what kind of factors contributed to motivate a group of nurses at a nursing home in western Sweden to to perform their work. Furthermore, the authors wanted to investigate whether the staff nurses felt that the leader helped to increase or reduce the perceived motivation to perform such work, and the way in which staff nurses perceived their relationship to the leader. The study is based on Herzberg's (1959) two-factor theory, Hackman and Oldham's (1980) work designs theory and Leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, and those theories are the basis of the study's structure. The study was of a qualitative property, interviews were conducted with seven nurses and was structured, the questions concerned their subjective experience of motivating factors in their everyday work. The results of this study demonstrated that respondents experienced confirmation, the meaningfulness of the work, work colleagues, beneficiaries of care and residents' families as contributing factors to motivate them in their daily work.

As a newly graduated student in construction you rarely have as much knowledge as you wish you had. It is a complicated line of business that requires knowledge and understanding of both technical solutions and interaction between actors. It is impossible to be fully learned and with that much unknown it can be hard to know where to start. This report is one step in the right direction. It contains a planning that contains construction and installations for a one level house in Kiruna with its different choices motivated.

The purpose of this thesis is to describe how an entrepreneur and leader, transmits a vision through communication. Furthermore what kind of feedback the leader finds that he/she acquire. We want to study how entrepreneurship and leadership appears at a private preschool and how the entrepreneur and leader use it to communicate his/her vision.This thesis is based on qualitative method using one in-depth interview with CEO at Helianthus AB, documents and one observation at a parental meeting. The theories of which this study is based on consist of entrepreneurship, transformational and transactional leadership, vision and communication. The theories used in this thesis regard entrepreneurship, transformational and transactional leadership, vision and communication.Our study strengthened the assumption that our respondent is an entrepreneur and leader according to chosen theories.

In today?s tough business environment the need for good and efficient leaders are becoming more and more important. The businesses are in constant change, the world is more unpredictable and the competences of the employees are much greater today, which also calls for a new type of leader, a leader who not only is authoritarian, but also possesses soft skills. In this environment where there is this greater focus on leaders, leadership developments have emerged and increased in number over the last ten to twenty years. They try to develop leaders in all domains of their life, both professional and personal and the model we work with in this paper is Total Leadership, this model implies that you try to accomplish being a better leader throughout your whole life as a leader, to be whole, genuine and innovative, no matter career or position in life.

The aim of this thesis is benchmarking of the program, based on dynamic programming, that earlier was written to imitate the production planning at TSS.This thesis starts with a chapter about the construction of the DP-program, a shorter description of one and each of the program parts and also a list over the in- and output data in each program part. The DP-program consists of six linked MATLAB-files that together produce an optimized production plan for the different planning groups at TSS. The program reads in and reformat the given data and optimize the production of the articles in one group. Finally it compounds all article production plans and give us a production alternative.After running the program with new data the result shows, resembling with previous results, that TSS could be able to make some distinct cost-savings. According to the program, a 50 % decrease of TSS production costs is possible. .

This master?s thesis was performed during the fall of 2006 at Cloetta Fazer AB in Ljungsbro. Cloetta Fazer is the market leader in Scandinavia of manufacturing confectionary and chocolates. The purpose of the project has been to identify causes that impact the quantity of waste in production as well as a cost/benefit analysis of the solutions that can reduce the problem of production waste.The work includes four production lines that are individually designed depending on what kind of product that are produced on the line. By using qualitative and quantitative methods such as focus groups, interviews and observations data has been collected.

Title: A study about conditions for leadership in knowledge-intensive firms.Authors: Cecilia Ekström and Niklas SandbergKeywords: Leadership, knowledge-intensive firm, hierarchies, followers.Background: Leadership is becoming one of our greatest social myths and is considered a total solution for many problems that occur in an organization. The view of leadership is usually from a top-down perspective, which contributes to an often underestimated view of the follower. Just as it is important to understand the leader's view of leadership, it is important to understand how employees view the structure from which the leader derives its legitimacy. The existing conditions in knowledge-intensive firms, such as autonomy, place special demands on the formal leadership.Purpose: The purpose of this study takes an employee perspective, to understand what the conditions are for formal leadership in knowledge-intensive firms.Method: A qualitative research method was used and empirical material was collected through interviews with employees in knowledge-intensive firms. The empirical material was analyzed by the respondents? mental images which were set against the theoretical framework of the thesis.Conclusions: The conditions for formal leadership in knowledge-intensive firms make it advantageous to have a leader with a withdrawn role.

The aim of the study was to a) examine what leader behaviors individual and team athletes prefer and b) examine what leader behaviors men and women prefer. A questionnaire (The Leadership Scale for Sports) was distributed to 168 individuals, from which 130 were included in the study. The data was analyzed in SPSS, in which a three-way and a two-way variance analysis were performed. The results showed that individual athletes preferred the behavior dimensions ?Training and instruction?, ?Positive feedback? and ?Democratic behavior? to a higher degree than did team athletes.

This report contains results of our study at CTC in Ljungby. CTC produces heating products such as boilers, heat pumps and additional products to their heating systems.The purpose of the report is to make a proposal how CTC will supply their new production line for heat pumps with materials. The proposal includes a production layout and a scheme for how to place the material in the production storage.The new production line will produce two different products and both of them have several variants. The line will also have a mixed flow, so the products can be produced in a random order. These conditions demand that the production line has great flexibility and that the material to all the variants can be stored in the production storage.With these conditions as input we made a layout proposal to the company.

The effects of social media usage in a professional context, specifically the effects on social media usage in relation to leadership have been studied in order to determine weather or not usage can be productive for leadership in general. The study concludes that there are several benefits as well as drawbacks to leadership in using social media, but has yet to conclude weather productive or not. This study gives an overview of a relatively unexplored subject.Leadership in terms of leader, communication and group dynamics have been defined and explained in accordance with existing literature. A  brief review of computer and Internet history attempts to explain the formation and evolution of social media. Risks in terms of risks related to leadership and risks related to IT-security are taken into consideration and have been briefly explained.

The effects of social media usage in a professional context, specifically the effects on social media usage in relation to leadership have been studied in order to determine weather or not usage can be productive for leadership in general. The study concludes that there are several benefits as well as drawbacks to leadership in using social media, but has yet to conclude weather productive or not. This study gives an overview of a relatively unexplored subject.Leadership in terms of leader, communication and group dynamics have been defined and explained in accordance with existing literature. A  brief review of computer and Internet history attempts to explain the formation and evolution of social media. Risks in terms of risks related to leadership and risks related to IT-security are taken into consideration and have been briefly explained.