The concept of leadership development plays an important role within the modern organization. As a result of the increasing interest in developing leadership competencies, investments in Leadership development programs are becoming a common part of business strategies. However, the return on those investments is seldom evaluated. The reason for this is considered to be the complexity created by the many factors that influence leadership but have no relation to the program. This is a case study based on interviews with participants from a one-year Leadership development program that was carried out at AB Previa.

Title:                          Leadership development of individuals in management positions Authors:                    Carl Renér and Peter Simonsson  Institution:                Linneaus University, School of Business and Economics Program:                   Human Resource Management Course:                      Business administration ? Organization including thesis, 15 credits Supervisor:               Olle Duhlin (Linneaus University, School of Business and Economics) Examiner:                 Mikael Lundgren (Linneaus University, School of Business and Economics) It is widely known that the role of managers may result in stress and a heavy workload. As a result of this negative effects organisations have to counteract and find new solutions and systems to facilitate and assist leaders in their work. A popular method for leadership development has come to show both in research and in practice, especially in recent years, this popular method is known as mentoring. This form of leadership development is often applied in so called mentoring programs.

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 is to examine how teachers view their leadership, how leadership is used and developed, and what kind of perceptions teachers have of leadership and how it is important to their students.My questions are: In what ways can the teachers develop their leadership?In what ways can the teachers make use of leadership in the classroom?What do the teachers in the study consider to be a good leadership?What do the teachers inte the study think of their leadership and its´ importance to students? The study uses a qualitative research method and consists of interviews with four teachers working in a school south of Stockholm. The results of the study shows that teachers´ leadership in the classroom has a significance for students´ learning and development. The teachers´style of leadership should not be static and should be adapted to students´development level. The results also shows that teachers´ leadership in the classroom is about various tasks.

Over the period as a student at the Master's Program for Educational Leadership, I have learned thatsometimes the participants School?s management shows concern regarding the purpose of studyingat such a program. The curiosity of what that might devolve upon got me to immerse myself in theapproach to and attitude towards competence development within educational leadership.The essence of what I wanted to examine was how the students from the above mentioned Master'sProgram perceived the treatment they received from supervisors and colleagues and if it waspossible to explain the attitude that the participants in the study reported. I also wanted to examinewhat issues, related to competence development and leadership within the school system, highlightsthe treatment of participants in educational leadership.The results are based on questionnaires and interviews and are divided into four categories; thesupportive, the unaffected, the discouraged and finally a side category to explain how to handle thediscouraged?s lack of support.

The essay examines managers reflection after attending a leader development program. When examining their thoughts the author starts out from the assumption that leader development programs with reflecting elements can create reflection on management/leadership and the organisations management behaviour. The examination is done whit help of a case study on a company in the paint industry. To test the assumption the author uses a combination of questioners and interviews on eight managers who has finished a leader development program. The result is analysed by bringing forward the managers general assumptions an by finding relations between opinions on needs, existing norms and preferred management/leadership.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the attitude of four teachers to leadership in the classroom. The main research questions asked were:What are the teachers` views on leadership in the classroom?What does good versus  bad leadership mean to the teachers? What factors influence the teachers' leadership in the classroom, according to themselves?The method used is the qualitative method and interviews, which is my empirical material, I relate to different theories and previous research of leadership.The curriculum for the compulsory school system, the pre-school class and the leisure-time centre, Lpo 94, says a lot about how both the school and the teacher must pursue a democratic activity; the teacher must have a democratic leadership in the classroom (Lpo 94, s. 5). At school, the pupils should be met with respect, they should feel safe and be motivated to learn.

The purpose of this study is examine how Afghan women experience leadership in Afghanistan and how they perceive their existence and involvement in the country?s development?s process. The study is limited to the women leadership and its diffculties in the afghan culture, tradition and religion. Based on men?s and women?s perspective, I want to examine how they look at women?s leadership and its different problem in the afghan society.

AbstractThis essay contains a comparison between principals and supervisors within the Health-care and is focused on their view regarding their own leadership. It contains a comparison between their respective models for leadership and how to evolve as a leader within these two organizations.The study is carried out as in dept interviews with four principals and four supervisors.The results show that the principals have a sufficient education and a broad network, but they need the opportunity to a personal development within their leadership. On the other hand, within the Health-care, the supervisors stand on a good base of education where focus lies on the personal development within the leadership. However, they need more opportunities to build up their networks.The conclusion that can be drawn is that these two organisations would gain on learning from each other, in order to establish as good conditions as possible to improve the leaderships within their own organization..

Learning organizations and organizational development are interesting subjects that does not examine municipal organizations and private organizations an equal amount.  Furthermore, there exists little research on the effects of competence development for individuals in a leadership role within organizations. Because of this, we wanted to examine the impact of competence development in business modeling and how it affected local government activities. Competence development is used by organizations to develop their business and achieve a greater competitive advantage, but does competence development for individuals in a leadership role lead to organizational development? This paper examines competence development in the form of a business modeling course via the Bitstreamproject and the effects that occur within three municipalities as a result of the competence development. By interviewing three participants and four coworkers within different municipalities and studied the data from the Bitstream project, we can not conclude that competence development within business modeling leads to organizational development, only that it exists a tendency for it.

The transformational leadership and the Swedish Armed Forces? basic outlook on pedagogy are two factors that affect a Swedish military officer. The author has identified a need of understanding the process of personal development. An understanding that couldn?t be supplied by the transformational leadership but that was found in the Swedish Armed Forces? basic outlook on pedagogy.

Leadership is essential for every company. Its strength or weakness of direction, clarity, and evaluation affects success or failure of its organization. With the complex structure of the big and global companies today leadership is more challenging. The traditional view of leadership, with the single individual possessing all the competences and skills, is therefore being challenged by an alternative way of leadership, a shared leadership. Existing research on the subject is still scarce, which makes further studies in this field important.

Many research reports mention the fact that a huge number of all system development projects never reach a successful ending; with other words never fulfil formulated goals. By identifying and forming success factors (and in some aspect risk factors) that the project manager in practice can use, this study may be seen as a step in the direction towards minimising the high number of failed system development projects. The purpose of this research report is to investigate how a system development project, where the development process is based on a specific development or process model (in this case the Waterfall model), can and should be driven. I aim to clarify what is demanded of a project leader for the specific development process and give an account for which eventual leadership qualities that can be well suited for given situation in relation to the need for technical competence. Among other things the project manager should inspire confidence, drive, be a decision maker, engage and own some form of basic knowledge in the field of system development.

In this qualitative study the authors explores, by studying several quality-development models what quality in leadership is. The models are: Total Quality Management; SIQ?s model for customer-oriented organizational development; the EFQM excellence model; the ISO 9000:2000 standard; and Six Sigma. These models will be compared from Deming?s list for upper management; the Situational Leadership Theory; and the Contingency Theory.

Leadership is a well-known phenomenon in today?s world and researchers have developed multitudes of theories with different assumptions about what leadership is and what implications it has. Models of different kinds of leadership have been presented and researchers are constantly working on trying to find a definition of great leadership. Our thought was however that because every human being is unique it would be naïve to presume that all people hold the same perception about what constitutes good leadership. Although we believed that every person defines good leadership in his/her own way we also believed that there could be similarities to be found between illustrations generated from people with comparable organizational positions.