Background: Leadership can be understood from the perspective of corporate leaders and employees in two retail organizations such as ICA Maxi and IKEA in Sweden. Research to date has tended to pay little attention to the study of leadership and its related issues in retail organizations. Hence this study attempted to fill the gap by exploring the specified aims and objectives. Aims and Objectives: The aim and objective of this study are to offer new and profound insights into how corporate leaders engage employees when leading organizational change, and the rest. Additionally, to provide a deeper understanding with respect to the key challenges facing corporate leaders when leading organizational change in ICA Maxi and how they address these challenges. Method: By employing qualitative modes of inquiry and by using a case study approach, this paper sought to help illuminate the research questions and objectives in detail. This research was exploratory, interpretative, and inductive in nature and the empirical data were collected through a semi-structured and face-to-face interview from six corporate leaders/managers and six employees in ICA Maxi and IKEA in Sweden.      Findings: In addition to several other findings, this empirical research found that corporate leaders engage the employees by creating question and answer time in a way that demonstrates leadership in action. Furthermore, the corporate leaders not only engage the employees in a way that enables them to mobilize the support of the employees; but also, the corporate leaders engage the employees by voluntarily relinquishing leadership to them for the short-term. This research paper also found that corporate leaders who align themselves with vertical leadership tend to support vertical-participatory leadership in practice and both vertical-participatory leadership and participatory leadership can be problematic when leading organizational change. The corporate leaders in the retail organizations, ICA Maxi and IKEA could face challenges of adaption, a barrage of why questions from the employees, and a situation where the employees can become afraid of taking responsibility for wrongdoing. Finally, this study found that corporate leaders tend to address the challenges they face when leading organizational change by means of providing the right information and by joint consultation with the employees. Contributions: Theoretically, this research has contributed to filling the gap in the literature by adding to the growing body of research with respect to the phenomenon of leadership in retail organizations such as ICA Maxi and IKEA. Practically, this qualitative study has contributed to our understanding of how daily routines could be improved between the corporate leaders and employees in these retail organizations, ICA Maxi and IKEA. In terms of managerial contribution, this exploratory study has contributed to reminding the corporate leaders about the need to accelerate their leadership roles by implementing important policies with respect to selling products that are environmentally sound. As regards societal contribution, this thesis has contributed in creating awareness by highlighting different ways that corporate leaders could engage the employees appropriately and inappropriately.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:25:55Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Jose Reinaldo Pessanha.pdf: 378565 bytes, checksum: 7e6b92dfc326074e05575bbeba5b10bd (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-02-10 / Analysts are essential to the functioning of capital markets as they make predictions and recommendations that support the investment decisions of both institutions and individual investors. Analysts study the fundamentals of public companies, their growth prospects, financial structure and cash flow, corporate governance, industry structure and the macroeconomic environment in which companies are inserted. In this context, business leaders play a major role, as they influence the directions of the corporation and their performance. The goal of this paper is to investigate the influence of the concentration of power in the hands of the major corporate leader on the accuracy of analyst earnings forecasts of Brazilian companies. The accuracy is measured in accordance with the international literature. The proxy for the concentration of power was constructed by Silveira and Barros (2011b) and takes into consideration the individual power of the main corporate leader the Chairman of the Board of Directors (Chairman) or the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) and also the degree of passivity and homogeneity of the Board of Directors. The sample contains 107 public companies listed in BM&FBOVESPA (Bolsa de Valores de São Paulo) in 2010. It only includes companies that had analyst coverage in the twelve months preceding the end of the fiscal year. The forecasts and financial information were collected from Thomson One Analytics® and Economática®. Information on the concentration of power was provided by Silveira and Barros (2011b), who collected the data in the websites of companies and in Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM). The analysis shows evidence that the concentration of power positively influences the accuracy of analyst forecasts. This idea is in line with a few prior studies on the concentration of power and volatility of results that argue that powerful business leaders tend to be more conservative. / Os analistas de mercado são importantes para o funcionamento do mercado de capitais à medida que fazem previsões e recomendações que fundamentam as decisões de investimentos de instituições e investidores individuais. Para isso, os analistas estudam os fundamentos de companhias abertas, sua capacidade de crescimento de receita, estrutura financeira e geração de caixa, governança corporativa, setor de atuação e a conjuntura macroeconômica na qual as empresas estão inseridas. Nesse contexto, os líderes corporativos exercem papel preponderante, pois determinam os rumos das corporações e exercem impacto importante sobre seus resultados. O objetivo geral deste trabalho é investigar a influência da concentração de poder nas empresas de capital aberto brasileiro sobre acurácia das previsões dos analistas de mercado. A acurácia é mensurada através de metodologias utilizadas na literatura internacional. Como proxy para a concentração de poder é utilizada a medida construída por Silveira e Barros (2011b) que considera o poder individual do principal líder corporativo Presidente do Conselho de Administração (Chairman) ou Diretor Presidente (Chief Executive Officer CEO), a passividade e a homogeneidade do Conselho. A amostra é composta por 107 companhias de capital aberto listadas na BM&FBOVESPA (Bolsa de Valores de São Paulo) no ano fiscal de 2010. A amostra do trabalho consiste em um conjunto de dados em corte transversal. Foram consideradas na amostra somente as empresas que apresentavam cobertura dos analistas nos doze meses anteriores ao final do ano fiscal. As previsões e informações financeiras foram coletadas junto à Thomson One Analytics® e Banco de Dados do Sistema Economática®. As informações sobre concentração de poder referem-se à base de dados de Silveira e Barros (2011b) coletadas a partir de websites das companhias e da Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM). De acordo com os resultados encontrados há evidências de que a concentração de poder influencia positivamente a acurácia das previsões dos analistas. Essa ideia está alinhada com alguns estudos sobre concentração de poder e volatilidade dos resultados que argumentam que líderes corporativos poderosos podem assumir uma posição conservadora.