Abstract Title: When the cat is away… A study of pedagogical leadership at a distance Level: Final assignment for Degree of Master of science (one year) in Educational Management Author: Evelyn Joelsson Supervisor: Ulla Sebrant Date: 2013 may Leadership is a subject that has been discussed for many generations. Today’s leadership is something completely different than what has been practiced before, in the more hierarchical companies, when leadership was something you were born to do and the workers had no choice but to follow. In the globalised world that we live in today there are demands of a different kind than before and physical distance between leaders and their followers gets more and more common. Communication is the focus and the catchwords are patency, trust and availability. In our information society it is important to have an open dialog and to aim for continuous development. Often this is built with close and supportive leadership. My question is; how can you be a close and supportive leader when you are physically somewhere else? To find the answer to my questions I began with studying some previous work that has been done in this area, Maria Nordengren & Bengt Olsen (2006) among others. I interviewed ten people who all have some kind of experience with working at a distance and the professional leadership from afar. Two of them were leaders, four were employees that worked at a distance from the leader and four were employees working physically close to the leader. I asked them about communication, trust, patency and availability and found out that educational leadership is possible at a distance but also at a price. If you are a leader placed at a distance from your employees you need to be clearer in your communication than the leader close at hand and give the right information at the right time. Trust is very important as well as the physical meetings they have twice a year. Availability is important and many claimed that it was working satisfactory. The physical contact proved to be irreplaceable even if there are many technical tools available in today’s businesses. Employees at a physical distance from their leaders automatically need to take more decisions on their own and learn to take initiative faster than the ones who can just walk over to the leader and ask. For future research I suggest that you could look at the different kinds of distance between leaders and their followers, not just de physical, and maybe also the gender aspect of leadership at a distance. One could conduct a comparative study between different kinds of companies and see if IT-businesses differ from producing- or service companies. The communication strategies that were used was something I found interesting and is probably something you can look more into, for example when you use what tool for communication. I think my thesis has contributed to the understanding of the complexity of leadership at a physical distance and what it takes to be an educational leader in a scattered company today concerning communication, patency, trust and availability. Keywords: leadership, educational leadership, leadership at a distance, communication, distance, development opportunity, trust, patency and availability.

The main purpose of the present study was to examine the leadership styles of Turkish middle-level managers and leadership prototypes of Turkish employees in terms of task-oriented and people-oriented behaviours. The secondary purpose was to investigate the effects of incongruence between actual and ideal manager perceptions on three important work outcomes: performance (task and contextual performance), job satisfaction, and organizational commitment (affective, continuance, and normative commitment). A total of 320 people working in a wide range of organizations (71 managers and 239 employees) filled out the questionnaire. Employees rated their actual managers&rsquo / leadership style and also their ideal manager&rsquo / s leadership style (i.e., leader prototype) in the same questionnaire, while the managers rated their own leadership style as well as their leadership style as perceived by their subordinates. Additionally, supervisory-rated performance and self-rated job satisfaction and organizational commitment levels of employees were obtained. Results indicated that self-reported leadership styles of Turkish managers were consisting of more people-oriented behaviours than task-oriented behaviours. On the contrary, employees perceived their managers as being more task-oriented than people-oriented. Ideal leadership style for the employees were comprised of higher levels of both task- and people-oriented behaviours than their actual managers. Incongruence between the actual and ideal manager perceptions of employees predicted job satisfaction levels of the employees only. The results are discussed together with the implications, strengths and limitations of the study. Some suggestions for future research are made.

<p>ABSTRACT</p><p>The purpose of this c-level essay shall try to illustrate how a good leader is formed. We have investigated what influences leadership style, personal characteristics or individual competence have when recruiting a new manager. This study has been carried out with comparative applications because we wanted to study the similarities and differences between the Unemployment Office, the Social Insurance Office and the Social Welfare Administration.</p><p>We have used a qualitative method in interviews both with employers as well as the from the trade union representative’s perspective. Part of our results indicates that the trade union representatives and the employers are not always unanimous and do not request equivalent characteristics and knowledge at recruitment. We have also found certain differences in the recruitment process between the organisations despite the fact that they are all politically governed and have many organisational similarities. We do not claim any empirical generalisations about our results as we have studied only one municipality. Our conclusions establish how certain key factors relate to recruitment of mangers just in this municipality and in these organisations. The results, however, indicates the prominence of some key factors that might be of general importance.</p><p>One of the most important result that we found in this study was that the trade union representatives had more similar opinions with each other than those they had with their respective organisations. Furthermore it became obvious from the study that great significance was given to inter-personal relationships when recruiting a new middle manager. The most significant resemblance between the three organisations was that they requested a management style that inclined towards democratic values.</p>

ABSTRACT The purpose of this c-level essay shall try to illustrate how a good leader is formed. We have investigated what influences leadership style, personal characteristics or individual competence have when recruiting a new manager. This study has been carried out with comparative applications because we wanted to study the similarities and differences between the Unemployment Office, the Social Insurance Office and the Social Welfare Administration. We have used a qualitative method in interviews both with employers as well as the from the trade union representative’s perspective. Part of our results indicates that the trade union representatives and the employers are not always unanimous and do not request equivalent characteristics and knowledge at recruitment. We have also found certain differences in the recruitment process between the organisations despite the fact that they are all politically governed and have many organisational similarities. We do not claim any empirical generalisations about our results as we have studied only one municipality. Our conclusions establish how certain key factors relate to recruitment of mangers just in this municipality and in these organisations. The results, however, indicates the prominence of some key factors that might be of general importance. One of the most important result that we found in this study was that the trade union representatives had more similar opinions with each other than those they had with their respective organisations. Furthermore it became obvious from the study that great significance was given to inter-personal relationships when recruiting a new middle manager. The most significant resemblance between the three organisations was that they requested a management style that inclined towards democratic values.

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