Chefers och medarbetares uppfattning om ett gott ledarskap
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. With that assumption we decided to make an inquiry of how managers and coworkers apprehend good leadership in order to see if there were any differences or similarities between their respectively definitions. A potential difference was expected since managers and coworkers are supplied with different kinds of responsibilities and since the former is in control over the latter.The study was made as a quantitative research program and questionnaires were sent to people employed by public organizations in the south-east of Sweden. The questions were formulated from ten different theories of leadership; eight with positive references and two with more negative and deficient allusions (transactional leadership and laissez-faire/avoidant leadership). The result showed however that managers and coworkers generally defines good leadership in a similar way and thus, our initial thought was inadequate. Both groups appreciated all the positive forms of leadership but an interesting find was that they also valued a transactional leadership which normally is endowed with negative connotations. Both managers and coworkers also remained neutral to the statements linked to the model laissez faire, which originally was expected to be profoundly rejected by both groups.