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Leadership for Organizational
Change
– A case study of how insurance companies can develop their leadership to better manage organizational change
JACOB ANDRÉN
Master of Science Thesis Stockholm, Sweden 2016
Ledarskap för
Organisationsförändringar
– En studie om hur försäkringsbolag kan utveckla sitt ledarskap för att bättre hantera organisationsförändringar
JACOB ANDRÉN
Examensarbete Stockholm, Sverige 2016
Leadership for Organizational Change – A case study of how insurance companies can develop their leadership in order to better manage organizational change
Jacob Andrén
Master of Science Thesis INDEK 2015:57 KTH Industrial Engineering and Management
Industrial Management SE-100 44 STOCKHOLM
Ledarskap för Organisationsförändringar – En studie om hur försäkringsbolag kan utveckla sitt ledarskap
för att bättre hantera organisationsförändringar
Jacob Andrén
Examensarbete INDEK 2015:57 KTH Industriell teknik och ledning
Industriell ekonomi SE-100 44 STOCKHOLM
Master of Science Thesis INDEK 2015:57
Leadership for Organizational Change
– A case study of how insurance companies may develop their leadership in order to better manage organizational
change Jacob Andrén
Approved
2016-06-16 Examiner
Cali Nuur Supervisor
Annika Rickne Commissioner
Trygg-Hansa Contact person
Jesper Bengtsson
Abstract
Rapid development and changes in customer needs places high demands on companies to constantly adapt to new customer requirements in order to stay competitive. This places further demands on companies’ ability to put the customer in focus and quickly develop, produce and offer what the customers expect, which often implies organizational changes. Organizational changes can contribute to making employees feel confused and insecure concerning their new role, which in turn contributes to low motivation and inefficiency among employees. Research has shown that a critical success factor for changes is employees’ ability to cope and adapt to change. Leaders have a decisive role in this and can help employees considerably when it comes to this aspect. The problem is a lack of knowledge about which aspects of leadership are most important for companies to develop in order to better manage organizational changes. This research has investigated leadership deficiencies in insurance companies that prevent them from managing organizational changes effectively. Furthermore this research has examined how insurance companies may rectify the leadership deficiencies that have been identified in this research. The research consisted of a case study at Trygg-‐Hansa, which included both interviews and questionnaires. The results indicated that leaders have deficiencies within Self-‐Awareness, Communication, Lead Employees, Manage Change and Strategic Planning. Furthermore, the most important deficiency to improve is Communication since it is the foundation for the others in some extent. The findings in this research have both research and managerial implications. Regarding the research implications, this research identifies important leadership shortcomings that prevent insurance companies from manage organizational changes effectively. Regarding the managerial implications, the findings in this study may be too firm specific for urging other companies and organizations to use the results and suggested recommendation of this research. Key words: leadership deficiencies, important leadership deficiencies, organizational changes, rectify leadership deficiencies
Master of Science Thesis INDEK 2015:57
Ledarskap för Organisationsförändringar
– En studie om hur försäkringsbolag kan utveckla sitt
ledarskap för att bättre hantera organisationsförändringar Jacob Andrén
Godkänd
2016-06-16
Examinator
Cali Nuur
Handledare
Annika Rickne Uppdragsgivare
Trygg-Hansa Kontaktperson
Jesper Bengtsson
Sammanfattning
Den snabba utvecklingen och förändringarna i kundernas behov, ställer höga krav på företagen att ständigt anpassa sig till nya kundkrav för att förbli konkurrenskraftiga. Detta ställer även höga krav på företagens förmåga att sätta kunden i fokus och att snabbt utveckla, producera och erbjuda det kunderna förväntar sig, vilket många gånger innebär organisatoriska förändringar för företagen. Organisatoriska förändringar bidrar till att medarbetarna känner förvirring och osäkerhet i sin nya roll, vilket i sin tur bidrar till låg motivation och ineffektivitet bland medarbetarna. Forskning har visat att en kritisk framgångsfaktor för förändringar är arbetstagarens förmåga att anpassa sig till förändringar. Ledare har en avgörande roll och kan underlätta betydligt för de anställda när det gäller denna aspekt. Problemet är att det saknas kunskap om vilka aspekter av ledarskap som är viktigast för företag att utvecklas för att bättre kunna hantera organisatoriska förändringar. Därför har denna forskning undersökt ledarskaps brister som hindrar försäkringsbolag att hantera organisations förändringar effektivt. Studien har också undersökt hur försäkringsföretag kan korrigera ledarskaps brister som identifierats i den här undersökningen. Forskningen bestod av en fallstudie på Trygg-‐Hansa, som inkluderade både intervjuer och enkäter. Resultaten visade att ledarna har brister inom självkännedom, kommunikation, leda anställda, hantera förändringar och strategisk planering. Dessutom är kommunikation den viktigaste bristen att förbättra eftersom det är grunden för de andra bristerna i viss utsträckning. Slutsatserna i denna forskning har både praktiska och teoretiska implikationer. När det gäller teoretiska implikationer identifierar denna forskning viktiga ledarskaps brister som hindrar försäkringsbolag att hantera organisations förändringar relaterade till ökad kundfokus effektivt. När det gäller de praktiska implikationerna, kan resultaten från denna fallstudie vara för företagsspecifika att det är svårt att uppmana andra företag och organisationer att använda resultaten och de föreslagna rekommendationer som denna forskning resulterat i. Nyckelord: ledarskap luckor, viktiga ledarskapsbrister, organisatoriska förändringar, korrigering av ledarskaps brister
Foreword
This master thesis has been is written at the Industrial Engineering and
Management at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. The research has been
conducted during the following period: January 2016 to May 2016.
Acknowledgement
Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa, Jesper Bengtsson, for his great
support and commitment in this research. I'm impressed by your ability to always take the time
to listen and provide feedback and involve other employees in order to help me forward in the
research, no matter how much work that surrounds you. Without your incredible support, it had
been difficult to conduct this research. I also want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to
conduct my master thesis at Trygg-‐Hansa. It has been terrifically educational and interesting. I
also want to thank all interviewees and respondents (which is upwards of 80 people altogether)
that have participated in this study, for sharing their perception, which became the foundation
of this research. I am impressed and grateful for your humility and honesty despite this sensitive
topic. Without your help, I would not have been able to obtain such a good insight into the
leadership at Trygg-‐Hansa, and then had not been able to arrive at these interesting findings.
Furthermore, I would like to thank my supervisor, Annika Rickne, Professor in the area of
innovation, entrepreneurship and industrial dynamics of the Department of Industrial
Economics and Management at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. I would
like to thank you for your great support and commitment in this research. I am impressed by
your ability to balance your advice between a detail level and a holistic perspective. I want to
thank you for your availability and your wise counsel that has been an important guidance
during this research.
Many thanks for your engagement, knowledge, advice and support!
Jacob Andrén
Table of Contents 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 BACKGROUND 1 1.2 PROBLEM FORMULATION 2 1.3 PURPOSE 2 1.4 RESEARCH QUESTION 2 1.5 DELIMITATIONS 3 1.6 CONTRIBUTIONS 3 1.7 OUTLINE OF THESIS 3
2 THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY AND THE CASE COMPANY 5
3 LITERATURE REVIEW 7 3.1 LEADING ONESELF 9 3.1.1 HOW TO MOTIVATE LEADERS 9 3.1.2 SELF-‐AWARENESS 13 3.2 LEADING OTHERS 13 3.2.1 COMMUNICATION 13 3.2.2 LEADING EMPLOYEES 14 3.2.3 COACHING 15 3.2.4 INSPIRING COMMITMENT 16 3.2.5 EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT 16 3.3 LEADING THE ORGANIZATION 17 3.3.1 CHANGE MANAGEMENT 17 3.3.2 STRATEGIC PLANNING 18 3.4 COMPARING THE LEADERSHIP DEFICIENCIES 18 3.6 CONCLUDING REMARKS 21
4 METHOD 23 4.1 METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH 23 4.2 RESEARCH DESIGN 24 4.2.1 PRESTUDY 25 4.2.3 SEMI-‐STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS 28 4.2.4 QUESTIONNAIRE 34 4.3 UNSTRUCTURED INTERVIEWS 38 4.4 VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY 39 4.5 GENERALIZABILITY 40 4.6 ETHICS 41
5 RESULTS 42 5.1 RESULTS FROM THE SEMI-‐STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS 42 5.1.1 LEADING ONESELF 42 5.1.2 LEADING OTHERS 45 5.1.3 LEADING THE ORGANIZATION 47 5.2 RESULTS FROM THE QUESTIONNAIRES 47 5.2.1 LEADING ONESELF 48 5.2.2 LEADING OTHERS 49
5.2.3 LEADING THE ORGANIZATION 51
6 ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION OF THE RESULTS 53 6.1 ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION OF THE SEMI-‐STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS 53 6.1.1 LEADING ONESELF 53 6.1.2 LEADING OTHERS 58 6.1.3 LEADING THE ORGANIZATION 62 SUMMARY OF THE ANALYSIS OF SEMI-‐STRUCTURED INTERVIEW RESULTS 64 6.2 ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION OF THE QUESTIONNAIRES 66 6.2.1 LEADING ONESELF 67 6.2.2 LEADING OTHERS 69 6.2.3 LEADING THE ORGANIZATION 76 GENERAL DISCUSSION 79
7 CONCLUSIONS, SUSTAINABILITY, IMPLICATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH 81 7.1 CONCLUSIONS OF THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS 81 7.1.1 CONCLUSION OF THE FIRST SUB-‐RESEARCH QUESTION 81 7.1.2 CONCLUSIONS OF THE SECOND SUB-‐RESEARCH QUESTION 82 7.1.3 CONCLUSIONS OF THE MAIN RESEARCH QUESTION 85 7.2 SUSTAINABILITY 86 7.3 IMPLICATIONS 87 7.3.1 MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS 87 7.3.2 RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS 88 7.4 FUTURE RESEARCH 88
BIBLIOGRAPHY 89
APPENDIX 95 APPENDIX A: SEMI-‐STRUCTURED INTERVIEW GUIDELINE 95 APPENDIX B: INTRODUCTION TO THE QUESTIONNAIRE 96 APPENDIX C: QUESTIONNAIRE 97
List of figures Figure 1 Categories of motivators, what they affect and reason behind them 10 Figure 2 Research processes 23
List of tables Table 1 Comparing leadership deficiencies 20 Table 2 Information about the unstructured interviews 26 Table 3 The teams that participated in the semi-‐structured interviews 29 Table 4 Content in the semi-‐structured interviews 30 Table 5 The teams that participated in the questionnaires 36 Table 7 Illustration of how the analysis of the questionnaires were conducted 38 Table 8 The results of the leadership characteristic: Self-‐Awareness 48 Table 9 The results of the leadership characteristic: Communication 49 Table 10 The results of the leadership characteristic: Lead Employees 50 Table 11 The results of the leadership characteristic: Manage Change 51 Table 12 The results of the leadership characteristic: Strategic Planning 52 Table 13 Research’s content structure 64 Table 14 Classification of leadership strengths and weaknesses 67 Table 15 Analysis of the leadership characteristic: Self-‐Awareness 68 Table 16 Analysis of the leadership characteristic: Communication 69 Table 17 Analysis of the leadership characteristic: Lead Employees 72 Table 18 Analysis of the leadership characteristic: Manage Change 76 Table 19 Analysis of the leadership characteristic: Strategic Planning 78 Table 20 Connections between conclusions of RQ1 and RQ2 86
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1 Introduction
This chapter presents background, problem formulation, purpose, research questions, delimitations, contributions and outline of the thesis.
1.1 Background Today's society is characterized by rapid development and changes in customer needs. This places high demands on companies to constantly adapt to new customer requirements and benefit from opportunities to become competitive and avoid being ousted (van Bommel et al., 2014). Customers are nowadays demand faster delivery of products and services than ever before (Wollan et al., 2014). Customers are also demanding individually tailored offers to a greater extent than before (Da Silveira et al., 2001). This places higher demands on companies to quickly develop, produce and offer what customers expect, which is facilitated by changing their approach from inside out to outside in. This is one example of an organizational change that is common for companies nowadays. Inside out means that the company produces and offers what they think the customers wants without taking into consideration what the customer actually wants. Outside in means the opposite. Companies that are using an outside in approach means that they are customer focused, also called customer-‐centric (Hiebeler et al., 2012). Furthermore, by focusing on the needs of customers, a deeper understanding of the customer is acquired, which enables companies to offer more customized products and services faster. The insurance industry is currently undergoing the transformation from an inside out to an outside in approach, which implies changing the organizational focus from product-‐focused to customer-‐focused (Wallace, 2014). Product-‐focused corresponds to the inside out approach. Insurers have previously communicated with customers on occasions when a customer either underwrites insurance or reports an occurred accident, which is rare, except monthly financial transactions of the insurance premium (Crawford et al., 2015; Briggs, 2015). However, the insurance industry is about to change since customer nowadays demands more customized products and services. Insurers see the potential to achieve a competitive advantage and gain more customers by providing more customized products and services to clients. Transforming an organization from product-‐focused to customer-‐focused places high demands on the organization as a whole, since it is not just about changing the organizational structure or the IT-‐system, but it concerns changing peoples behavior as well. It is far more complex to change people’s behavior since people tend to relapse into earlier habits (Bouton, 2014). Leadership is generally one among many key factors that contribute to a company's success, but it becomes even more important during changes (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012; Pasmore, 2014). Furthermore, organizational change contribute to making employees feel confused and insecure concerning their new role and associated responsibilities, which in turn contributes to low motivation and inefficiency among employees. Research has shown that a critical success factor for change is employee's ability to cope and adapt to change (Prosci, 2016). Leaders have a
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decisive role and can help employees considerably when it comes to this aspect. However, it is not rare that leaders within organizations have earned their role because they are skilled in a certain task rather than having an ability to lead people (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012). In addition, organizations do not always emphasize the importance of investing resources in improving, educating and develop leadership skills enough (Packard, 2009). Therefore, it is not unusual that leadership within organizations has deficiencies, no matter what industry they belong to (Leslie, 2015). Organizations that have focused on developing leadership skills at all levels of the corporate hierarchy have three times the chance of being one of the companies belonging to top 20 percent in financial performances. (Sinar et al., 2014). Invest resources to develop and improve leadership contributes to better managing of organizational change within companies, but it also brings challenges. Leadership is a broad knowledge area, and it can be difficult for organizations to know which competencies and skills their leaders lack and thus needs to improve. Improvements of leadership may require education and change in leaders’ behavior. Changes may be unsuccessful because companies are overambitious, and choose to focus on changing and improving too many things at once (Paolo De Mora, 2014; Bouton, 2014). It is difficult to develop everything at the same time, therefore it is essential to prioritize which leadership deficiencies, companies should begin developing and why. Developing the most essential leadership deficiencies first, contributes to more effective organizational change (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012).
1.2 Problem formulation The success of organizational change depends on employee's ability to cope and adapt to change. In order for companies to achieve effective changes, high demands are placed on leading positions to support and lead employees through the change. Creasey & Hiatt (2012) argues that leadership deficiencies may cause constraints during organizational changes. The problem is that “leaders are not developing fast enough or in the right ways to match the new environment” (Petrie, 2014). This means that there is a lack of knowledge about which aspects of leadership are critical in developing companies to better manage organizational change.
1.3 Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify what is required from insurance companies leadership in order to better manage organizational change. Furthermore, this study aims to provide recommendations of how insurance companies may develop and improve the identified leadership deficiencies.
1.4 Research question To provide suitable solutions to the identified problems, a main research question was formulated: How can insurance companies develop their leadership in order to better manage organizational changes?
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To answer the main research question it is appropriate to divide it into two sub-‐research questions:
1. RQ1: What are the leadership deficiencies in insurance companies that prevent them from managing organizational change effectively?
2. RQ2: How can insurance companies create conditions for leaders that facilitate the managing of organizational change?
1.5 Delimitations The scope was delimited to conduct research within one of Sweden’s major insurance companies: Trygg-‐Hansa. There are 1700 employees within Trygg-‐Hansa, around 700 of them work at the headquarters in Stockholm. This research collects empirics from about 100 of those 700 employees. In addition, this study mainly investigates the leadership level closes to the coworkers in the corporate hierarchy due to the largest dissatisfaction with the leadership is perceived to originate from those coworkers. Furthermore, this study is delimited to investigate and assess the current leadership, which affects employee efficiency and productivity level. Leadership is related to HR issues and belongs to the individual and organizational level (Blomkvist & Hallin, 2014). Employee efficiency and productivity are related to the functional level as it concerns a production perspective. In the method chapter of generalizability, it is discussed whether this research results are applicable for the entire insurance industry and on that basis, there is a perspective on the industrial level as well, although the industrial level is not examined. Furthermore, the research was delimited to investigate Sweden’s insurance market. In addition, this is not a business case; this means that nothing related to Trygg-‐Hansa’s economy (e.g. revenue, cost) is considered.
1.6 Contributions This report mainly contributes to the leadership literature by providing insights into and explanations of what aspects in the leadership that has deficiencies within insurance companies in order to better manage organizational changes. Furthermore, this research explains what initiatives that are required from organizations in order to develop and improve these deficiencies.
1.7 Outline of thesis This paper contains seven chapters: Chapter one is an Introduction and consists of Background, Problem formulation, Purpose, Research Question, Delimitations, Contributions and Outline of thesis. Chapter two consists of an introduction to the case company and the major challenges insurers are currently facing.
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Chapter three is a Literature Review and covers relevant literature related to required leadership skills to manage organizational change, which provides the foundation for the analysis and discussion as well as for the solving of the problem. Chapter four regards Method and describes how the research was conducted. This chapter consists following sub-‐chapters, Methodological Approach, Research Design, Validity, Reliability, Generalizability and Ethics. Chapter five is about the Results and contains empirical findings from interviews and questionnaires. Chapter six is an Analysis and Discussion of empirical findings from a literary and previous research perspective. Chapter seven is a Conclusion of the research and it presents the findings from the analysis of empirics and presents a proposed solution to the problem by answering the research questions. It also consists of Implications, Sustainability and Future research.
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2 The insurance industry and the case company
This chapter presents an introduction to the changes that the insurance industry is currently facing. Furthermore, this chapter explains why the case company was chosen and some background information about the company.
The insurance industry has previously faced limited competition from other industries, which has been a protection from the need of renewal and transforming it to remain competitive. The industry begins to encounter increased competition from other industries, which forces the companies to innovate (Amoroso et al., 2009). Customers are becoming more involved in the purchasing processes, which mean that they care more about what the insurance actually consists than before. Customers compare the costs against the benefits of insurance more actively nowadays. Furthermore, customers care less about brand loyalty (Amoroso et al., 2009). This indicates that there is no longer enough to acquire new customers, but failing to make customer satisfied results in lost customers. Therefore, there is now a higher requirement for insurance companies to make customers more satisfied than before. The key behind these improvements in the insurance industry are in many respects digitization. Digitization means to convert analog information into digital form. Digitization is currently in full progress within the insurance industry and contributes to processes become faster and more cost efficient (Dreischmeier et al., 2015). One part of digitization is that companies chose to invest in their core business, which contributes to the customers experience better customer service, self-‐service and handling of insurance matters (Briggs, 2015). Digitization implies opportunities to implement effective sales tools and sales online, which means better service for the customers. The digitization era also means that the insurance companies need to innovate their products, in order to be able to offer such as cyber insurance and insurance for self-‐navigating vehicles, which will be a part of the future. The digitization era places demands on insurance companies to develop their business model and adapt the company so they can quickly and easily develop and offer what customers want in order to avoid becoming customers’ second choice, or at worst completely ousted. The opportunities and challenges of digitization have contributed to many changes take place simultaneously within the insurance industry. Organizational change is more difficult to manage for large organizations than for small ones (Tarkenton, 2013). It is more difficult for large organizations to have the whole organization moving in the same direction during the change and especially when the company is widely distributed over a whole country. Trygg-‐Hansa is the company where this study has been conducted. Trygg-‐Hansa is currently Sweden’s fourth largest insurer and have approximately 1700 employees distributed over 30 local offices in Sweden and the headquarters is in Stockholm (Trygg-Hansa, 2016). Trygg-‐Hansa is own by the British insurance group RSA, which is a public company. Trygg-‐Hansa was chosen as the case company since the insurance industry is an exciting industry that is currently facing various organizational changes that is going on simultaneously. This implies lots of
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opportunities and challenges for the companies within the industry and especially for the major players. Trygg-‐Hansa has a clear ambition of becoming the Swedish leading service company by 2020 and outperforming the market (Trygg-Hansa, 2015). To achieve the ambition Trygg-‐Hansa is actively working to transform their organization and become customer focused. Becoming customer-‐focused means, for Trygg-‐Hansa, to make improvements for the customer so that they are experiencing that everything is simple and works fine (Trygg-Hansa, 2015). In addition, Trygg-‐Hansa's largest distribution channel is currently direct, but the online channels are constantly growing and thus become increasingly important (Trygg-Hansa, 2015). This together with increased focus on expenses means that Trygg-‐Hansa need to rethink how to conduct business and prioritize what opportunities and what challenges that is most important from a customer and competitive perspective. These kinds of organizational change that is currently going on within the insurance industry are not always fully defined from the beginning, as the limits of the future are uncertain. This means it is difficult to define employees’ responsibilities from the beginning of the change, but rather employees’ responsibilities change in pace with the change itself. This results in employees become confused concerning their new responsibilities or even sometimes: new roles (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012; Pasmore, 2014). Furthermore, if employees are confused, it contributes to low motivation and inefficiency among employees. Therefore, leadership seems to be a key factor for better managing the organizational changes that is currently going on within the insurance industry.
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3 Literature review
This chapter presents existing literature, research and theory within the confines of leadership that lays the foundation in order to answer the research questions. The following text presents an introduction to the literature review and explains why the various literatures have been chosen for this research.
The literature and theory in this chapter aim to provide a foundation that facilitates the understanding and answering of the main research question: How can insurance companies develop their leadership in order to better manage organizational changes? The main question has been broken down into two sub-‐questions that require answers in order to answer the main question. The two sub-‐questions are repeated below.
1. RQ1: What are the leadership deficiencies in insurance companies that prevent them from managing organizational changes?
2. RQ2: How can insurance companies create conditions for leaders that facilitate the managing of organizational changes?
The second sub-‐research question is dependent of the first sub-‐research question since the second sub-‐research question aims to mainly provide recommendations of how to rectify the identified leadership deficiencies from RQ1. This contributes to that the literature for the first and the second sub-‐question are in some cases presented under the same sub-‐chapter in the literature review. However, there are sub-‐chapters in the literature review that only contains literature related to RQ1, and there are also sub-‐chapters in the literature study that only contains literature related to RQ2. The literature review presents research regarding common leadership deficiencies for both companies in general and for companies that facing organizational change. This provides a better understanding of the first sub-‐question. Furthermore, it is also presented how companies may help their leaders to rectify the leadership deficiencies, which provide a better understanding of the second sub-‐question. The leadership deficiencies for companies in general are: Self-‐awareness, Leading employees, Employee development, Inspiring commitment, Change management and Strategic planning (Leslie, 2015). The leadership deficiencies for companies that face organizational changes are: Communication, Coaching, Change management and Strategic planning (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012). At the end of this literature review, the identified leadership deficiencies from both Leslie (2015)’s and Creasey & Hiatt (2012)’s researches, are compared in order to identify similarities and differences as well as to understand why they may have different perceptions. The literature review further presents other authors view and perception of what the various leadership skills (e.g. Communication, inspiring commitment, etc.) require. In addition, the literature review has gone beyond the research regarding leadership deficiencies and also presents what may be a cause of the problem: previous research regarding what motivate leaders is presented because unmotivated leaders may cause leadership deficiencies in organizations. It is essential to understand why leaders are unmotivated, what is
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required for leaders to be motivated and what organizations may do in order to increase leader’s motivation to enhance their performances as leaders. This aims to provide an enhanced understanding for both RQ1 and RQ2. The literature review as well as the rest of the report (except the method) is divided into three leadership dimensions: Leading oneself, Leading others and Leading the organization. In order to have a well functioning leadership during organizational changes, it requires leadership within all three dimensions (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012). By using this division, a better overview of what is reviewed in the literature study is achieved and thus it may be avoided that any relevant literature is left out of the literature review in this research. By using the leadership dimensions as headings throughout the whole report, it facilitates the analysis and discussion chapter, since RQ1 and RQ2 can then be analyzed and discussed in the same text section. Like for instance: identified leadership deficiencies can be discussed side-‐by-‐side with an appropriate initiative of how the organization may rectify it. This literature review is structured according to the bullet point below. Within the parentheses, it is illustrated whether the sub-‐chapter contains literature for RQ1 or RQ2 or both.
• 3.1 Leading oneself o 3.1.1 Motivate leaders (RQ1 & RQ2) o 3.1.2 Self-‐awareness (RQ1 & RQ2)
• 3.2 Leading others o 3.2.1 Communication (RQ1) o 3.2.2 Leading employees (RQ1 & RQ2)
§ Initiating structure & Consideration o 3.2.3 Coaching (RQ1) o 3.2.3 Inspiring commitment (RQ1 & RQ2) o 3.2.4 Employee development (RQ1 & RQ2)
• 3.3 Leading the organization o 3.3.1 Change management (RQ1 & RQ2) o 3.3.2 Strategic planning (RQ1 & RQ2)
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3.1 Leading oneself This chapter presents existing literature, related to leadership deficiencies and what organizations can do to help leaders enhance the deficiencies, that is classified as Leading oneself. Leading oneself means leaders ability to lead, manage and develop themselves. In this literature review, Leading oneself contains two sub-‐chapters: the first concerns motivate leaders and the second is about leaders self-‐awareness.
3.1.1 How to motivate leaders
Leadership is a major contributing factor in organizational productivity. Productivity means the efficiency of converting input (resources; machine, human, personnel, energy, money, materials, etc.) to output (e.g. Money, produced units, etc.) (Tangen, 2005) (Bernolak, 1997). Improved employee performance results in increased organizational productivity and motivated leaders can influence employees’ performance at higher extent, than non-‐motivated leaders (Tucker, 2010). In addition, employees’ performances are crucial for successful organizational changes. Thus the leader’s motivation becomes critical to the success of change. In order to motivate leaders, it requires an understanding of the leader's driving forces. Driving force means the reason why people act a certain way (Eccles et al., 1998). The motives are influenced by the context and surrounding environment. It is common that organizations associate motivation with compensation, such as bonus, increased salary, stocks or promotion, to drive productivity (Baker et al., 1988). This type of compensation is called extrinsic reward. Intrinsic is another form of motivation concerning learning, joy, and mental well being (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Intrinsic motivation can also come from organizations whose trying to offer interesting roles for leaders. However, there are four types of motivations, and by knowing what each leader is motivated by, organizations can reward each one in suitable way to maximize performances, which could contribute to increased productivity for the entire organization. The following text explains the different motivations, which are independent of position and rank within the company. Various authors have different theories of the motivators. Graves et al (2016) argues that there are mainly four different types of motivations; external, introjected, identified and intrinsic (which is the gray painted circles in the figure below). However, Ryan & Deci (2000) argues that there are mainly six motivators, amotivation, intrinsic motivation and four kinds of extrinsic motivations: external regulation, introjection, identification and integration (which is both the white and gray painted circles in the figure below).
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Figur 1 Categories of motivators, what they affect and reason behind them (Ryan & Deci, 2000)
Ryan & Deci (2000) describes both all the different motivators and the non-‐motivator (amotivation) that an individual may experience while Graves et al (2016) provides a more simplified model, where the non-‐motivator and the integration are excluded. If an organization understands what makes employees motivated, they can thus avoid that employees are unmotivated, i.e. amotivation. Graves et al (2016) may have omitted amotivation from their investigation due to that reason. It is also perceived that the difference between identification and integration is minimal since both concern different perspectives of goals, which probably is the reason why one of these two is omitted from Graves et al (2016) study. This study intend among other things to increase the understanding of how organizations may help leaders to rectify their deficiencies, thus this literature review focuses to acquire a deeper understanding of what motivates people and leaders. Therefore, Graves et al (2016)’s theory was perceived as more appropriate for this literature review. This means that only the gray marked circles in the figure above; external, introjected, identified and intrinsic, is presented and discussed in this literature study. External motivation means that employees are driven by personal benefits as a reward from satisfying others. These people are driven by external rewards such as praise, promotion, stocks and money, but also by avoiding punishments from not fulfill tasks. Introjected motivation means employees are driven by maintaining their personal self-‐value and avoid feeling apprehensive of not having done what they should. In both external and introjected motivation, staff experience required responsibilities and behaviors as forced in some extent since tasks and requirements often originate from organizational standards. It is not always that employees share these beliefs fully. The other two motivations are perceived differently as they come from within the individual instead. Identified motivation means employees achieving personal goals through hard work. An example might be to secure their own pension or to develop a system
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that facilitates the daily work of other employees. Intrinsic motivation means that employees are driven by their own interests and perform tasks because it is exciting, fun and educational. The individual feels that responsibility is voluntary and self-‐directed. They receive positive emotions that contribute to increased attitude to work, which provides good performance. Generally speaking, employees working to meet personal goals or employees having a role with interesting responsibilities that they feel good about contributes to performance at higher levels. (Ryan & Deci, 2000; Graves et al., 2016; Koestner & Losier, 2002). According to Graves et al (2016), when 321 managers in the United States were examined; it was found that individuals with high score within intrinsic and identified motivation are most favorable for companies. The reason is that they focused to fulfill personal goals with enjoyable tasks and have engagement to the company in a larger extent. It also turned out that they were least likely to leave the organization. Employees with intrinsic or identified motivation do not put much emphasize on external motivation. However, McCombs (1991) argues that the connection between the subject and peoples’ personal interests and goals are crucial aspects to facilitate learning (McCombs, 1991). This means that the most favorable motivators for learning is intrinsic and identified motivation. It is essential to realize that employees’ motivation is possible to change if the work environment is supportive of employees. Supportive work environments provide managers with a sense of security, where they have interesting tasks and responsibilities from their perspective and can achieve their own personal goals (Carpenter et al., 2012). Threatening work environments (excessive work demands, high level of competition and absence of employment security) contribute, unlike supportive work environments, to managers trying to protect or defend themselves by focusing on satisfy others to avoid losing their jobs or to increase their status. To create work environments in organizations that facilitate managers’ internal motivation to grow, the organizational policies, reward systems, and manager’s support should be reviewed (Graves et al., 2016). On the support of managers Managers' bosses have a crucial role to elicit managers' internal motivation. Managers need to feel support from their bosses, like for instance that manager’s contribution brings value to the organization and that bosses care about the manager’s well-‐being and make them feel secure, to induce managers’ internal motivation (Ngima & Kyongo, 2013). If this support is missing, it contributes to that manager may feel unsafe or threatened about their role. If managers feel unsafe, they may have difficulties in communicating their interests, goals and values, which results in a lower internal motivation of managers. Bosses ought to encourage managers’ self-‐direction and problem solving rather than control their work and provide solutions for them. This is because when managers feel more responsible, it creates increased commitment, increased quality and productivity as they search for solutions themselves (Williams, 1995). Managers interests need to be identified which enable tasks can be adjusted accordingly. This means that manager’s work becomes more personally meaningful and interesting, which creates internal motivation. Bosses need to continuously provide managers with informative feedback. Furthermore, it is essential that bosses listen to
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managers’ feelings and ideas instead of ignoring them. Banks (1997) argue that these supports from bosses encourage the growth of managers’ internal motivation. Reward systems The rewards are something organizations can use in order to motivate leaders to better contribute to organizational changes. According to several authors, the rewards are, in many organizations an essential element to motivate managers and employees (Härtel & Fujimoto, 2015) (Hurd et al., 2012) (Lederer & Karmarkar, 2013). Other authors argue, that rewards have less importance to motivate better performance (Sundheim, 2013; Chamorro-Premuzic, 2013). Although, the authors disagree that all individuals are driven by external rewards, it is apparent that some people are positively affected in their performance by external reward while others are not affected at all. Anyway, the effects of external reward depend on how they are designed; they can be affirming or manipulative (Pierce et al., 1999; Deci & Gagné, 2005; Graves et al., 2016). Manipulative rewards create significant pressure on managers to achieve a specific result. This means that managers' behavior, thoughts and feelings are controlled by rewards instead of their own interests, values and goals (Ledford et al., 2013). Affirming rewards means that managers are rewarded when they meet organizational objectives they consider important. It enables managers to devote time for the challenges they believe are interesting and relevant to the organization, which increase their internal motivation and thus performance (Florence, 2009). Whether the reward is manipulative or affirmation form, it always consists either of the following: increased salary, bonus, increased holdings of shares and promotion. Manipulative and affirmation concerns the reasons why the managers receive rewards, not what they receive. Organizations who want to promote high-‐performing managers should use affirming rewards, since managers who work with their interests performs at a higher level. To earn the reward, challenging and interesting objectives should be formulated for the managers. To reinforce the relevance regarding the objectives, it is important to link manager's objectives with organization's objectives and vision (Boswell & Boudreau, 2001). Organizational policies Organizations that are characterized by politicized work environments, means that promotions and rewards are given depending on rather subjective factors (e.g. Create strong relationships with important employees by agreeing with their ideas or actions in order to increase or maintain status) than objective factors as actual performances (Sharabi, 2012; Arian et al., 2012). This means that managers focus on strengthening relations in front of contributing with good performance. Politicized work environments, contrary to the growth of managers’ internal motivation. As mentioned before, managers’ motivation is critical to achieve successful organizational changes.
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Given the foregoing reasons, organizations should review the reward and promotional procedures to ensure that appropriate performance measures are used to evaluate individual rewards instead of rewarding employees’ relationship with powerful people.
3.1.2 Self-‐awareness This leadership characteristic includes being self-‐aware of ones strengths and limitations. It also means notice personal mistakes and learn from them and continuously seek feedback to improve own performance (Cates, 2015; Musselwhite, 2007). Leslie (2015) argues self-‐awareness is considered to be deficiencies for leaders in companies in general. Leslie (2015) argues that organization’s can facilitate leaders' self-‐awareness by introducing assessments of leaders. Leaders should be assessed by subordinates, peers, bosses and even in some cases external partners such as suppliers and customers. The advantage of collecting opinions from such a broad perspective is that it creates a good general picture of the person's leadership qualities. Best practices and lessons learned can be applied from both inside and outside of the organization.
3.2 Leading others This chapter presents literature that is classified as Leading others. The existing research that is presented in this chapter is related to leadership deficiencies and what organizations can do in order to facilitate and enhance the deficiencies. Leading others imply everything related to interaction and communication between leaders and other employees. Leading others contain five sub-‐chapters in this research: communication, leading employees, coaching, inspiring commitment and employee development. Leading employees have in turn one sub-‐chapter: initiating structure and consideration.
3.2.1 Communication
Gilley (2005) argues communication is a crucial aspect during organizational changes as employee acceptance and participation in change, depends on their personal opinion about the benefits that the change brings. Employees weigh in-‐arguments against counterarguments of change in order to form an opinion about the personal advantages and disadvantages that the change brings (Knowles & Linn, 2004). Employees commit in what they believe in. Therefore, it is the leader’s responsibility to explain and convince employees why a change is needed or why a decision is made. Employee acceptance and participation are decisive for successful implementations. Failing to engage employees can result in an unsuccessful implementation that can affect the organization and relationships within the organization, but also the company's customers and reputation (Benedict, 2007). Communication during organizational change concerns leaders to mediate relevant information about changes to subordinates; why change is needed and what the benefits are (Green, 2004; Rousseau & Tijoriwala, 1999). Furthermore, it include informing about the expected impacts on the organization; what, how and why something or someone is impacted by the change. This includes being able to clarify the change’s impact on each specific employee (Creasey & Hiatt,
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2012). Communication also involves gathering feedback and listening to employees’ concerns and questions regarding the change and provide answers to their questions. In addition, it includes informing about subordinates’ new expectations and performance targets. However, Creasey & Hiatt (2012) argues that leaders usually have shortcomings in some or several of these skills. It is not unusual that leaders do not know what, how and when to communicate essential information regarding the change to subordinates. Leaders lack to inform or are unclear about change details to impacted employees and lack listen to employee concerns and answer their questions. There are several reasons why leaders do not always manage to answer employees' questions, for example, pure ignorance, refusing or if leaders lack an understanding regarding the change.
3.2.2 Leading employees
Leaders with good abilities in leading employees have knowledge about how to effectively delegate responsibility and recruit talented people to their team (Heskett, 2007). This requires that leaders have the knowledge and tools needed to lead subordinates effectively, like for instance the ADKAR model which is a tool that contains theory and knowledge about how organizations and leaders ought to manage organizational changes. Leslie (2015) argues that most companies and organizations have leadership deficiencies in leading employees. It is also important that leaders understand how to use this knowledge and tools based on their role, which is the organization's responsibility to ensure. Assuming that leaders have been informed of and understood that, they should be assessed on their skills in managing subordinates. Furthermore, it is appropriate to develop internal groups and forums where leaders can exchange: experiences, mistakes and what they learned related to lead employees. It is also appropriate that organizations create a work environment that encourages feedback, and develops guidelines for how feedback should be exchanged (Schwartz, 2011). However, there are mainly two ways to lead employees. These are presented in the sub-‐chapter below. Initiating structure and Consideration There are mainly two independent dimensions of effective leadership that received increased attention concerning how subordinates are affected by leaders’ behavior, which is consideration and leaders initiating structure (Chance & Chance, 2009). These two dimensions have been evolved by investigation of several industries such as insurance, manufacturing and railroad. Initiating structure concerns, behaviors that are task-‐oriented (or related) and involves to what degree leaders control subordinates; it includes clarifying the role and responsibilities of employees by helping to coordinate, plan, encourage to perform better, provide feedback, solve problems. (Dubinsky et al., 1988). Task-‐oriented leaders also take into account the relational aspects, but prioritize organizational structure and processes to achieve results. As a leader is clear on initiating structure, employees feels less ambiguity in their role and what is expected from them, which contributes to increased commitment to the organization, increased job satisfaction and increased job performance (June, 2011; Srikanth & Jomon, 2013; Dubinsky et al.,
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1988). Srikanth and Jomon (2013) argue that role ambiguity leads to staff interpret work tasks and requirements, which contributes to varied standards and performance depending on how the individual interprets responsibilities. This contributes to reduce overall performance within the company. Consideration is about behaviors that are relationship-‐oriented (also called people-‐oriented (Engen et al., 2001; Turner & Müller, 2005; Yiing & Ahmad, 2009)) and concerns to which extent leaders are personable, understandable and care about employees’ well being. Common actions associated with consideration is such as accommodating, friendly, listening, observing, coaching and supports subordinates (Tabernero et al., 2009; Gary et al., 2002). It includes a transparent form of communication and praise employees for their contributions. These kinds of leaders are still considering tasks to achieve results, but they emphasize the human relation. As a leader communicates high degree of consideration, such as leaders listens to employees and letting them participate in decision-‐making, it contributes to higher job satisfaction and better performances (Bhuiyan, 2010). Therefore, it is suitable that the leader actively listens, advises and supports employees (Dubinsky et al., 1988). It is rather for leaders provide constructive feedback to employees than inspecting their work. There are correlation between leadership behavior and organizational values (Tsai, 2011). Leaders tend to act similar to organizational values. Like for instance leaders within organizations that emphasize initiating structure tends to show more behaviors related to initiating structure and vice versa. Effective leaders possess abilities within both task-‐oriented (initiating structure) and relationship-‐oriented (consideration) behaviors (Dubinsky et al., 1988; Chance & Chance, 2009). Chance & Chance (2009) agree with Dubinsky et al (1988), but also emphasizes that leaders’ behavior needs to align with the situation to be effective.
3.2.3 Coaching
Coaching is defined as the process which performance is improved by the development of synergistic relationships between employees and their leaders. This is done through mentoring, counseling, education and confrontation (Gilley & Boughton, 1996). Coaching by leaders creates an increased self-‐awareness among employees and thereby employees’ strengths are maximized and weaknesses minimized. Hence, employees’ performances are enhanced (Hill, 2004; Whitmore, 1997). Furthermore, coaching involves leading, motivating, supporting, listening and providing both positive and constructive feedback to employees, which will build trust to employees. In addition, the leader’s job is facilitated by interpersonal characteristics such as reading people and emotional intelligence. Hudson (1999) argues that coaching enables leaders, allowing employees to make mistakes in order to learn from them and thus evolve. Furthermore, he claims that coaching helps employees to become more receptive to renewal and reduced resistance to change, which has a positive effect on organizational changes. Coaching aims to bring out the best in people, inspire employees to become motivated and help employees to become focused on both their own and the company’s future (Hudson, 1999). However, Creasey & Hiatt (2012) argues that leaders usually have shortcomings in some or several of these skills. Occasionally, leaders lack coaching, supporting, motivating, listening and leading employees throughout organizational changes. Sometimes leaders tend to lack giving
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employees balanced feedback between positive and constructive. Some leaders tried to bully or bossing employees, which seemed to be ineffective. Leaders that have been promoted because of their technical skills, lack sometimes the ability to lead people. Leaders tend to underestimate the importance of their role in driving the change within their teams. Furthermore, they lack interpersonal characteristics such as, trust, reading people, openness and emotional intelligence. In addition, they lack set expectation of employees.
3.2.4 Inspiring commitment
Leaders who pay attention, praises and rewards their subordinates on the basis of their performances, can inspire commitment among subordinates (Keskes, 2013). In order to provide employees with appropriate rewards, it requires an understanding of what motivates employees. Thomas (2009) argues that rewards should be given in fulfillment of significant organizational improvements. Subordinates’ commitment can be further strengthened if leaders clarify organizations’ vision and explain how it is linked to their role in the company (Slack et al., 2010; Martin & Schmidt, 2010). This comprises to clarify subordinate role in how it helps to fulfill organizations’ vision. In addition, Damen (2007) argues that commitment from leaders is contagious and affects subordinates positively, resulting in better performance (Damen, 2007). Research has shown that not only commitment, but also human emotions in general is contagious, both positive and negative emotions (Fredrickson, 2003). Furthermore, Lyubomirsky et al (2005) suggests that positive emotions correlate to favorable outcomes (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). Like well as positive emotions affects favorable outcomes, negative emotions affect unfavorable outcomes (Brown et al., 1997). Leslie (2015) argues that companies in general have deficiencies within this leadership skill. Organizations can facilitate for leaders by helping to communicate the vision to employees in the company. Furthermore, leaders should be encouraged to increase the expectations of subordinates' performance. Organizations should confirm high-‐performing subordinates publicly to promote increased commitment.
3.2.5 Employee development A leader with expertise in developing employees can help subordinates to improve their performance by providing coaching, guidance and encourage good performances (Varney, 1989) (TNS Employee Insight, 2014; Frankovelgia, 2010). Leslie (2015) argues that many companies have deficiencies within employee development. Organizations can help leaders to develop this skill by encouraging leaders to regularly conduct career conversations with subordinates where their career goals are discussed and designed how they will be achieved. In addition, organizations should develop succession-‐planning processes, which means to prepare talented employees with training in order to fill key leadership positions within the company when necessary (Baldwin, 2000). This contributes to a more secure future for the company since it becomes less sensitive to pensions or the defection of key employees, but it also motivates employees to high-‐performance to get the chance to be promoted.
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3.3 Leading the organization This chapter presents literature that is classified as Leading the organization. The existing research that is presented in this chapter is related to leadership deficiencies and what organizations can do in order to facilitate and enhance the deficiencies. Leading the organization contains two sub-‐chapters in this research: change management and strategic planning.
3.3.1 Change management
Leaders need training in change management in order to properly handle organizational changes (Benedict, 2007; Hanson, 2013). Furthermore, leaders must understand why change is necessary, since it facilitates leaders' support to the change. Leaders influence employees, thus if leaders support the change, employees will do it as well. Leaders should also publicly demonstrate and advocate support to the change. They need to be visible, engaged and support subordinates throughout the entire change as subordinates feel uncertainty (Green, 2004) (Rousseau & Tijoriwala, 1999). Furthermore, leaders need to manage resistance from employees. It is essential that leaders understand that their role is decisive in order to influence and drive the change within their own team. In addition, leaders need to assess that time and resources are enough to conduct change. It is also the leaders’ responsibility to link impacted employees to the change management team (which is responsible for the whole change in the organization) in order to provide design input of change in coworkers’ role. Finally, leaders should inform the change management team how well subordinates move through the change process, including adoption and performance. Dishonest, unfair, misleading and deceptive information from leader to subordinate regarding change can create a vindictive feeling among employees (Folger & Skarlicki, 1999). In contrast, employees treated with truthful and fair information create enthusiasm and commitment to change among employees, even if it entails negative aspects and unwanted results for the employee in question (Cobb et al., 1995). Getting employees to be involved and contribute to change is an important prerequisite for a successful change. Therefore, it is important that the information provided is true even if the change results in a negative impact on employees. However, Benedict (2007) argues that leaders often lack sufficient training in change management and are thus not prepared for the change. Both Leslie (2015) and Creasey & Hiatt (2012) argue that leaders usually have shortcomings in some or several of these skills. It is not uncommon that leaders lack understanding of how the change will impact the return of investments and why knowledge about change management is essential to achieve successful organizational changes. Leaders that resist the change or expresses themselves negatively about the change (e.g. Change will not last) or lack understanding of the necessity about change, indicates to employees that change is not important. Time to time, leaders intentionally withholding information concerning the change from a subordinate. Occasionally the leaders lack knowledge about how to handle the change. It is common that leaders find it difficult to clarify employees’ new role due to lacking understanding of how the change will impact subordinate roles. Leaders lack being visible and engaged consistently throughout the change,
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sometimes due to they believe employees will take responsibility of the change themselves other times they think the change management team (which is most responsible for the entire change in the company) take responsibility for conducting the change. Furthermore, leaders lack to identify, confront and proactively implement conflict resolutions to subordinates whose showing resistant behaviors to change. Leaders do not fully link impacted employees to the change management team as well as they do not always inform the change management team how well subordinates move through the change process. This makes it more difficult for the change management team to take action against those things that do not fully work resulting in a non-‐complete change from what was planned. Organizations may help leaders by enabling training in change management through courses and urge leaders to involve subordinates in decision making since it creates commitment (Anderson & Anderson, 2010). One of the most common models that are used to train leaders in change management nowadays is Prosci’s change management process (Hiatt & Creasey, 2003). In addition, it is crucial to give leaders space for: communicating important information regarding changes to coworkers and exchanging ideas with each other’s. It is also appropriate to help leaders manage employees’ resistance to change.
3.3.2 Strategic planning Creasey & Hiatt (2012) argues that strategic planning involves having the ability to understand the organizations’ long-‐term vision and strategic direction. Furthermore, it involves translating the vision into objectives for both teams and individuals. This leadership skill involves the ability to translate organization’s vision into business strategy (Leslie, 2015; American Society for Quality, 2004). Leaders with expertise within that skill have ability to formulate long-‐term and short-‐term goals and strategies for the team as well as plan for unforeseen events. However, both Creasey & Hiatt (2012) and (Leslie, 2015) argues that this is considered as leadership deficiencies for both organizations in general and for companies facing organizational changes. Top management being clear in communicating both strategy and factors that influence the strategy to leaders within the organization can facilitate this leadership skill. In addition, train leaders in strategic thinking such as change management, risk management. Furthermore, it is suitable to involve young talents in the development of the strategy as it increases leaders’ strategic thinking (de Vries & Korotov, 2010). Rotating leaders on a regular basis to contribute to build up more experience and thus leaders are prepared for higher positions within the organization. Learning about strategic planning can be enhanced by mentoring and coaching (European Mentoring & Coaching Council, 2012).
3.4 Comparing the leadership deficiencies This sub-‐chapter aims to compare leadership deficiencies for companies in general (the deficiencies emphasized by (Leslie, 2015)) and leadership deficiencies for companies that facing organizational changes (emphasized by (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012)). The comparison, which is shown in the table below, highlights similarities and differences between the two authors stated
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deficiencies. The similarities between the theories are illustrated with italic and underlined characters combined with numbers within parentheses. The most obvious similarities between the two researches’ leadership deficiencies are at the top of the table and the bottom contains the major differences between the two researches.
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Table 1 Comparing leadership deficiencies
Leadership deficiencies in org. changes (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012) Leadership deficiencies in general (Leslie, 2015) Deficiency Aspects Deficiency Aspects Strategic planning
Understand organizations long-‐term vision and strategic direction Translate the vision into objectives for team and individuals (0)
Strategic planning
Translate organizations vision into business strategy
Formulate long-‐ and short-‐term goals for the team that aligns with the company vision (0)
Planning for unforeseen events Change management
Demonstrate and advocate support for change (1) Change management
Leaders being positive about the change (1)
Understand why change management is essential Develop strategy to facilitate organizational change
Understand how the change impacts return on investments Manage employees resistance to change (2)
Understand how to manage (incl. Support employees) the change
Create engagement by involving employees in change (3)
Understand employees new role
Understand that employees may feel unsecure about the change
Be visible throughout the change
Be engaged throughout the change
Be consistent throughout the change Celebrate successes
Manage employees resistance to change (2)
Influence and drive the change within the teams (3)
Link impacted employees to the change management team to provide input of the design of the change
Provide feedback to change management team how well subordinates move through the change process, including adoption and performance
Coaching (4) Support employees
Leading employees (5)
Motivate employees (6)
Lead employees (5) Delegate tasks to employees
Motivate employees (6) (7) Recruit top talents
Guide employees (8) Create opportunities for employees
Mentor employees
Inspiring commitment (7)
Pay attention and publicly praises performing employees
Listen to employees Reward (according to what motivates employees)
subordinates according to performances
Understand employees
Reading people Employee development
Clarifying employees role
Openness Coaching employees (4)
Provide employees with balanced feedback between positive and constructive
Guide employees (8)
Set expectation on employees Encourage good performance to develop employees
career
Discuss career goals with employees and how to achieve them
Succession-‐planning processes to train employees to
take over key positions within the company Communication Inform why the change is needed Self-‐
awareness Be aware of one owns strengths and limitations
Inform what benefits the change brings Learn from own mistakes
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Inform about expected impact on the organization (incl. job roles)
Seek feedback from others regarding own performances
Answer questions
Gather feedback regarding change
Listen to employees
Communicate expectation and performance
After comparing the leadership deficiencies emphasized by the two different researches of both Creasey & Hiatt (2012) and Leslie (2015), it is obvious that both researches highlight mainly the same deficiencies. Both researches emphasize strategic planning as a critical leadership deficiency and it is quite similar content within strategic planning from the two authors. Both researches also highlighted change management as a critical deficiency, but Creasey & Hiatt (2012)‘s research contains more details than Leslie (2015)’s, since Creasey & Hiatt (2012)’s research is all about how to conduct organizational changes (the result of Creasey & Hiatt (2012)’s research was the Prosci’s Change Management Process, which includes the ADKAR model and is one theory about how to conduct organizational changes) and Leslie (2015)’s research focuses on identifying leadership deficiencies in general. Creasey & Hiatt (2012) put emphasize on leaders to really understand everything that concerns the change in order to be able to support both the change itself and employees during the change. The next leadership deficiency concerns manager’s ability to lead employees, Creasey & Hiatt (2012) has named that deficiency coaching, and Leslie (2015) has divided that deficiency into three sub-‐deficiencies, leading employees, inspiring commitment and employee development. Even if the various authors term this deficiency with different names, the similarities are many. The major differences are that Creasey & Hiatt (2012) emphasize the importance of listening and understanding employees while Leslie (2015) has more elements of motivating and inspiring employees through rewarding performances and help employees developing their careers. Lastly Creasey & Hiatt (2012) emphasize the importance of communication while Leslie (2015) accentuates self-‐awareness. During organizational changes, employees feel confusion (e.g. About their role). Therefore, communication becomes whim important. Leslie (2015) stated self-‐awareness instead as the last leadership deficiency. However, the table above is used as the foundation for the creation of the questionnaire, where inputs have been taken in from both authors.
3.6 Concluding remarks The existing research that has been covered in this literature review presents the major leadership deficiencies for companies in general and for companies that face organizational changes. Furthermore, it presents what organizations may do in order to rectify the leadership deficiencies within their organization. What seems to be a deficiency in the literature is a closer examination of what the main leadership deficiencies are for companies that undergoes organizational changes. Different authors emphasize different leadership deficiencies, but it is not possible to distinguish what aspects that are in more need of improvement than others.
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This research intent to examine the leadership deficiencies that prevent insurance companies from managing organizational changes effectively. Furthermore, this research intends to examine how insurance companies may create conditions for leaders that facilitate the managing of organizational change.
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4 Method
This chapter presents the methodological approach, research design. Each choice will be defined, described and discussed. Thereafter, this chapter ends with a discussion regarding generalizability, validity and reliability.
4.1 Methodological approach There are no previous researches that investigate the leadership deficiencies that prevent insurance companies from managing organizational changes effectively. Nor is there any research that investigates how insurance companies can create conditions for leaders that facilitate the managing of organizational changes. Thus a case study was considered as the most suitable methodology for the research. A case study is, according to Collis & Hussey (2013), “used to explore a single phenomenon (the case) in a natural setting using a variety of methods to obtain in-‐depth knowledge.” A case study presents original research, where specialization occurs in a particular unit of the research area. However, it is not always possible to generalize the findings into other contexts in a case study. This research investigated several departments at Trygg-‐Hansa’s headquarter. The advantage of a case study is plurality that data collection methods can be combined and used in parallel as e.g. Documentary analysis, interviews, questionnaires and observations. This means that this research could combine both qualitative and quantitative methods during the data collection in order to achieve more details regarding the leadership, such as rate several aspects of the leadership in a questionnaire, but also to obtain in-‐depth personal opinions from employees on how they perceive the leadership from their leader. The disadvantages are that it can be difficult to obtain access to appropriate sources of information and empirical data as sources mostly consists of people's personal opinions and perceptions. This was essential for the researcher to keep in mind during the research, especially since leadership, which was the subject examined, was perceived as a personal characteristic for some interviewees. Therefore, to criticize or demonstrate weaknesses in someone's leadership was perceived by some interviewees as the same as criticizing the leader itself. Although the purpose of the research was not to demonstrate personal shortcomings of individual leaders, but lifting it to a general level to find a general lack of leadership, many interviewees felt that the interviews were personal assessment of their leaders. This contributed, in some cases, that the interviewees were concerned that telling the whole truth, because if any sensitive information would leak out and it appears in retrospect that it was they who had said it, they risk getting fired. This was something the researcher kept in mind and clarified for everyone involved (interviewees and respondents) that everything that is said, written or communicated to the researcher is totally anonymous. This contributed to the interviewees and respondents were willing to share sensitive information to a greater extent. In addition, a case study is generally time consuming, which is important to take into consideration. The purpose of this paper is to identify and define what is required from insurers’ leadership in order to manage organizational changes. Furthermore, this study aims to provide an explanation
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of how organizations may help their leaders to rectify their leadership deficiencies. The classification of the purpose of this study is descriptive research since it is conducted to describe phenomena, as it exists. It is used to identify and obtain information on the characteristics of a particular problem or issue. This study collected and analyzed mainly qualitative data since it requires employees’ opinions and perceptions in order to understand the problem and thus come up with suitable solutions. However, in order to obtain more details regarding which specific aspects in the leadership that are in need of improvements to manage organizational changes, a quantitative method in the context of a questionnaire was used. Therefore the classification of the research process is both qualitative and quantitative. Furthermore, this study intended to solve a specific existing problem, thus the outcome of this research is classified as applied. The logic of this research is abductive approach and according to Blomkvist & Hallin (2015) the abductive approach describes the relationship between theory and empirics, and how the reader is influenced by the empirical study when assessing the literature.
4.2 Research design This research was characterized by an iterative approach, meaning that background, problem formulation, purpose, research questions, delimitations was updated when new insights was acquired (Blomkvist & Hallin, 2014). A general overview of the research is described in the text under the flow chart below, and then each part of the research is described in detail in the following sub-‐chapters.
The research started with a prestudy consisting of one seminar, several unstructured interviews and document analysis combined with literature review to identify the scope and acquire a fundamental understanding of the subject. After a sufficient literature was covered, data collection was the next step in the process, which contained semi-‐structured interviews and questionnaires. Thereafter the data was analyzed: the empirics were compiled, structured and
Prestudy • Seminar • Unstructure interviews • Document analysis • Identify scope
Data Collection • Semi-‐structured interviews • Questionnaires
Data analysis • Compile, structure and compare results • Analyze & discuss results and connect to literature
Conclussion • Compile insight and key sindings • Formulate recommendation
Literature review
Report writing
Figure 2 Research processes
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compared with each other, in order to identify similarities, differences and patterns. Finally, conclusions and insight were found after an analysis of the empirics, which resulted in recommendations. Literature was gathered in the beginning of the research in order to understand the problem further and literature was gathered after the interviews and the questionnaires in order to complement the literature review. The report writing was conducted simultaneously with the other processes.
4.2.1 Prestudy
At the beginning of the research, a prestudy was conducted in order to identify the problem and acquire a fundamental understanding of it. According to Collis & Hussey (2013), a prestudy aim to make the researcher familiar to the subject that will be investigated. The prestudy resulted in the identification of both the problem and delimitations as well as formed perceptions of what literature that needed to be acquired to the research. The prestudy was carried out through observing during a seminar, interviews and analysis of Trygg-‐Hansa documents, all which was related to the topic of the research. The conducted activities (seminar, interview and document analysis) within the prestudy are described and presented in chronological order in the text below. In the very beginning of the prestudy, the researcher attended at a seminar together with employees from Trygg-‐Hansa to get inspiration to the research. Magdalena Gerger was invited as speaker. She had, during recent years worked at Systembolaget and been most responsible for Systembolaget’s organizational change; to make the company customer focused. Her work resulted in Systembolaget has been named Sweden's best service company for 3 years in a row, voted by the Swedish citizens (ServiceScore, 2013; Livets Goda, 2014; ServiceScore, 2015). This seminar was rewarding since Magdalena told about how she managed to succeed with what Trygg-‐Hansa is currently trying to do; to be the best service company in Sweden by placing the customer in focus. The seminar provided inspiration to search for problem areas at Trygg-‐Hansa in key areas, which Magdalena claimed were crucial for the success of the organizational change for Systembolaget. One among the key factors that contributed to Systembolaget succeeded during their organizational change was the leadership, according to Magdalena. Furthermore, it was forbidden to record during the seminar, therefore only notes were taken. The researcher brought insight from the seminar and began with prestudy interviews to compare if there are similar deficiencies and areas of improvement at Trygg-‐Hansa. Initially, the prestudy interviewees were chosen after consultation with the supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa. After each interview, each interviewee provided anything from one to three new recommendations of interviewees. Throughout the entire prestudy, the supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa was kept constantly informed and updated on new insights regarding the research. Thus, he could continuously provide new recommendations of interviewees for the prestudy in parallel with the recommendations from the interviewees. In order for the prestudy interviews to provide maximum contribution with insights to the research, interviewees were informed about the research’s topic in the beginning of the interview. The interviews during the prestudy consisted of unstructured interviews, which means that no questions are prepared in advanced, but they evolve during the interview (Collis & Hussey, 2013). Unstructured interviews are mainly
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characterized by open-‐ended questions to take part of employees’ personal feelings, opinions and perceptions of the current situation. Totally fourteen interviews with employees at Trygg-‐Hansa were conducted, four that lasted 30-‐60 min and ten that lasted 15-‐20 min (illustrated in the table below). All of the interviewees worked at Trygg-‐Hansa’s headquarter in Stockholm and all interviews were conducted there as well. The interviewees were both managers and employees in order to gain insights from a wide perspective. The following positions were interviewed during the prestudy (each role within the tale below represent one person);
Table 2 Information about the unstructured interviews
Role [Name]
Interviews [#]
Time [Min]
Head of Digital Transformation & System Ownership 3 15-‐60 Director of Personal Lines business 2 15-‐60 Senior Customer Insight Manager 2 15-‐20 Customer Journey Manager 2 15 Proposition Manager 1 15 HR Business Partner -‐ Personal Lines 2 15-‐45 Head of Product Development Commercial Lines 1 20 Digital Business Developer 1 30
Total 14 -‐ Notes were taken actively during all the prestudy interviews. The first prestudy interview was recorded, but due to the reason that the researcher had an office among the employees at Trygg-‐Hansa's headquarter, where the research took place, it was considered more time efficient to ask employees what they said during the interview (if uncertainties arise) than listening through the interview recording, therefore there were no more recordings during the prestudy. The unstructured interviews during the prestudy resulted in that leadership for organizational change were defined as an improvement area, that was going to be further investigated. Trygg-‐Hansa has provided managers in the organization with training and literary materials in ADKAR, which is a methodology for managing organizational change. The researcher considered the literary ADKAR material as appropriate foundation for the research since organizational change is what characterizes the research question. Therefore, the ADKAR material was read through while notes were taken. 4.2.2 Literature review This literature review was conducted in order to gather literature and theory that provides an enhanced understanding of the phenomenon that has been studied. This means this is a phenomenon-‐driven work (Blomkvist & Hallin, 2014). The literature review has been conducted parallel with the other processes during the research, which is illustrated in Figure 2 above. The literature review aimed to provide a fundamental understanding of the research topic: leadership demanded to better handle organizational changes, in order to facilitate the understanding and to confirm insights of the empirical findings
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from both interviews and questionnaires. The literature review aims also to provide a foundation for the development of the questionnaire, as well as a foundation for the analysis and discussion of the results of the interviews and questionnaires. A literature review is not just about presenting earlier research, but to read, critically examine and comparing earlier research in order to ensure that literature can be trusted. This means that several authors’ perspective of the same theory is compared and different theories are complied to complement each other. (Collis & Hussey, 2013) The literature review comprises mainly articles, journals, reports and books. Most of the literature was collected by search in Google Scholar and KTHB Primo, but some literature: the theory of Prosci Change Management Process, was allocated by the supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa in the form of previously purchased literature and education for leaders within Trygg-‐Hansa. The literature review of this thesis focuses on theory related to leadership deficiencies in general and leadership deficiencies for organizational changes. The following literature areas were covered in the literature review:
• Initiate structure (task-‐oriented leadership) vs. Consideration (relationship-‐oriented leadership)
• Motivates leaders • Communication (organizational changes (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012)) • Leading employees (Leslie, 2015) • Inspiring commitment (Leslie, 2015) • Employee development (Leslie, 2015) • Coaching (organizational changes (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012)) • Change management ( (Leslie, 2015), organizational changes (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012)) • Strategic planning ( (Leslie, 2015), organizational changes (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012)).
During the literature review, two well-‐established leadership questionnaires came across: the “Skillscope” and “Benchmarks for Managers”, which is developed by CCL (Centre of Creative Leadership). The questionnaires are used to assess leadership strengths and weaknesses within organizations (Kaplan, 2013). There are three dimensions of leadership in the Benchmarks for Managers-‐questionnaire: Leading oneself, Leading others and Leading the organization. The Skillscope contains mainly two dimensions: Leading oneself and Leading others. The problem was that those two questionnaires are not adapted to assess leadership for organizational changes. Therefore, semi-‐structured interviews were carried out in order to create a sense of how the Skillscope and the Benchmarks for Managers needs to be supplemented in order to assess leadership for organizational changes more specifically. Search-‐words that were used to find the literature were mainly: ”insurance”, ”insurance industry”, ”leadership”, ”leadership style”, ”task-‐oriented leadership”, ”relationship-‐oriented leadership”, ”leadership deficiencies”, ”leadership deficiencies”, ”motivate leaders”, ”leadership for change management”, ”change management leadership”, “coaching”, “leading employees”, “employee development”, “strategic planning”, “communication + leadership”, “self-‐awareness + leadership” and “inspiring commitment”.
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It was difficult to recognize relevant literature in the beginning of the research, thus, a thorough examination of the literature related to leadership was done, with a focus on identifying frequently referred authors. Thereafter, relevant literature, to answer the research questions and to fulfill the purpose, was chosen. An excel document was used in order to keep an overview of what literature had been covered and what literature was left to review. The chosen literature was divided into subgroups depending on content. Three main chapters were introduced that all literature was sorted under. The three main chapters were named: Leading oneself, Leading others and Leading the organization. Then the literature review was written in the report. The aim of the literature review was to provide a critical review of all relevant literature that contributes to fulfill this paper’s purpose, but it is difficult to ensure that all relevant literature have been covered in the literature review in this thesis due to the time limit of this paper.
4.2.3 Semi-‐structured interviews This chapter contains two subchapters; Planning & execution of the semi-‐structured interviews and Analyze of the semi-‐structured interviews. Planning and execution of the semi-‐structured interviews Semi-‐structured interviews were conducted in order to obtain qualitative data regarding how coworkers perceive the current leadership within Trygg-‐Hansa. The interviews aimed to identify what aspects of the leadership that should be further investigated and what aspects that should be left out during the following questionnaire. Therefore, these semi-‐structured interviews can be seen as a qualitative prestudy. Before the interview took place, a plan was developed for everything that concerned the interviews. The plan covered the following: what questions should be asked during the interviews and in which order, how long should the interviews last, how should the empirical results from the interview be analyzed and which teams and which employees from the teams should be interviewed. The plan was shown and discussed with the supervisor at KTH, in order to get constructive feedback on any aspect that had been missed to be taken into consideration and thus need improvements before the interviews was carried out. In order to identify relevant interview objects that would represent a fair picture of the whole organization, it is essential to understand the different departments within Trygg-‐Hansa further. Trygg-‐Hansa is a company with a lot of different kinds of departments, some departments that work closely with the customer, and have contact with customers in different ways during the daily work while others work more with back-‐office related tasks. An example of one department that working close to the customer is "Claims" that provides support to customers and manages clients who report damages and accidents. Another example is "Direct Sales -‐ Company", which is responsible for additional sales to existing customers and sales of insurance to new corporate clients. "Inbound" is one department that receives incoming calls from private and corporate customers. There are also departments working more behind the scenes and make sure that everything works for the customer, examples of such department are:
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"Brokerage services" working with clarifying information and communicates with insurance brokers. "Operations & Processes" are responsible for the development of internal IT systems, "Trading" are responsible for developing insurance policies for customers with complex combinations of insurance. "Product development" involves development of insurance conditions and premiums, there are two such departments: "Product development -‐ Company" and "Product development -‐ Private". In order to form an fair and appropriate perception of the leadership’s current level at Trygg-‐Hansa, coworkers in both customer-‐related departments and support functions were examined during the semi-‐structured interviews. Trygg-‐Hansa has several leadership levels within the company, but after the prestudy, it was assessed that the largest dissatisfaction with the leadership is experienced by employees at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy, therefore the researcher chose to focus on acquiring a deeper understanding of the deficiencies in the leadership from their perspective. Totally eleven semi-‐structured interviews were conducted. The teams that participated in the semi-‐structured interviews are presented in the table below. These teams were selected after carefully advise from the supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa, in order to form a credible perception of leadership at a general level within the company.
Table 3 The teams that participated in the semi-‐structured interviews
Team [Name]
Team members [#]
Respondents [#]
System Ownership & Strategy 11 2 Digital Business Development 4 2 Product Development – Enterprise 7 2 Product Development – Private 9 1 Broker service 12 2 Direct Sales – Enterprise 7 2
Total 50 11 The names of the teams are at the far left in the table above, the number of team members is placed next on the right side, and thereafter interviewees that participated. People’s perspective of the same leadership varies widely from person to person. This may be due to employees have had different leaders previously, which they compare the current leader with. If they had a better leader before they would probably perceive the current leadership as poor and vice versa. Therefore, it is important to gather the perspective from more than one person from each team, which creates a better overall picture. The optimum scenario had been to interview all persons in each team, but it would have meant 50 interviews in total for all the six teams that were chosen to participate in the semi-‐structured interviews, and there were not enough time for doing that. The fewer teams that are being examined, the more people can be interviewed in each team and vice versa. Therefore, it becomes a balancing act between the width of the number of interviewees per team and the width of the number of teams that are being investigated. Finally, two interviewees from each team seemed to be reasonable in order
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to acquire an enough broad perspective of both the leadership within each team and the organization. The Skillscope and the Benchmarks for Managers are two leadership questionnaires developed by CCL (Center of Creative Leadership) and are used to assess a wide range of leadership skills. These two questionnaires were used as a basis when the template with conversation-‐topics for the semi-‐structured interview was developed. The questionnaires are firmly established and have been used to assess leadership of 2,000 leaders in 24 organizations in three different countries. The Skillscope has 98 activities for the respondents to assess and the Benchmarks for Managers have 94 activities. This is one random example of an activity: “Does not hesitate when making decisions”, which the respondents is supposed to rate on a scale between one and five. The two questionnaires are quite similar. The both questionnaires cover Leading oneself and Leading others, but the Benchmarks for Managers cover Leading the organization as well, which include assessment of strategic perspective and change management. The Skillscope focuses on the former two more. Thus, inputs were taken from both questionnaires. The following areas were covered during the semi-‐structured interviews:
Table 4 Content in the semi-‐structured interviews
Leadership dimensions
Semi-‐structured Interviews # Questions
Leading oneself
1 Prioritize 2 Time Management 3 Knowledge of their role
4 Knowledge of the company
5 Fast learner
6 Result oriented
7 Ambition 8 Drive 9 Productive 10 Availability 11 Weigh responsibility
12 Handling of pressure
13 Handling of setbacks
14 Optimistic
15 Reliable
16 Self-‐awareness
17 Utilizes strengths
18 Compensating weaknesses 19 Self-‐development 20 Seeking feedback 21 Receptivity to feedback
Leading others
22 Searching information 23 Communicates important information 24 Negotiation 25 Confrontation
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26 Conflict resolution
27 Build relationships with subordinates/peers/superiors
28 The recruitment of suitable people to the team
29 Delegate 30 Listen to other peoples' ideas 31 Organize and manage people 32 Clarify employees role 33 Advisory to / mentor / develop subordinates 34 Motivate
Leading the organization
35 Organize and manage projects 36 Coming up with new ideas
37 Deciding on improvements/changes, Implementations and Follows up
38 Interpret company's strategic direction for the own team
These leadership areas were further developed and clarified before the interviews took place in order to avoid that the interviewees misinterpret the questions. The semi-‐structured interview template is attached in Appendix A. Even if the interview guideline mainly consisted of Skillscope and Benchmarks for Managers-‐related conversation topics, it all started with questions about the interviewees’ age, educational and professional experiences in order to acquire a better understanding of why the interviewee may perceive the leadership in a certain manner. Thereafter, the interview guideline covered strengths and weaknesses regarding the current leadership, the interviewee was urged to talk freely about their current leaders. Questions about leadership strengths and weaknesses were covered before the prepared conversation topics since it enables the interviewee to brainstorm aspects of leadership without their thinking has been influenced by thinking in a certain manner. When the interview guideline was developed, the researcher discussed with the supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa regards how to take contact with each leader for the chosen teams and what to inform them about. The supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa recommended the researcher to describe short and concise with just a few sentences about the research’s and the interview’s purpose, how they will be conducted and how the results will be used. This was done in order to use as a foundation when the researcher confronted and tried to convince each leader to participate in the research. Then the researcher took contact with each leader to inform them what the research is all about, explain the purpose of the study and how the results would be used. The researcher asked each leader for permission to interview two of the leaders’ coworkers. All six leaders accepted to be assessed by their coworkers and no leader denied. The researcher asked all leaders to recommend at least three names from their teams that they thought would be appropriate interview objects. This was done in order to increase the likelihood that the interview objects provide the researcher with well-‐described information about how they perceive the leadership
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within their team and thus avoid interviewing coworkers that have a problem with describing what they perceive. The risk with asking for tips on interview objects is that, the leader can choose to recommend coworkers that appreciate the leader and will thus just talk well about him or her, which does not give a fair picture. Two leaders out of six made an exception, they thought is would be better if the researcher chose the interview objects. The two leaders assigned a list of names of their coworkers in their teams, to the researcher. This resulted in four interviews out of eleven, were randomly selected. In one of those four interviews the interviewee explained everything worked fine. The researcher tried to get the interviewee to describe in more detail, what works fine, but without any results. That interview gave hardly any useful information. So, with the risk in consideration of getting a biased picture of the leadership when the leader provides the researcher with recommendations of interview object, the researcher still perceives it to be the most appropriate approach. Each leader informed its coworkers about the purpose of this research via e-‐mail before the researcher approached them, because if employees understand that the research aims to provide recommendations that may facilitate employees’ day-‐to-‐day work-‐situation at Trygg-‐Hansa, the participation in the study may increase. Then, the researcher received information from the leaders about where to find the coworkers that had been selected for interview. The researcher took personal contact with the interviewees and informed briefly about the research and then asked kindly if he or she had one hour off, to set aside for an interview, which resulted in eleven yeses and one no. Thus, eleven interviews were conducted instead of twelve (six teams and two interviews per team). The interviews were semi-‐structured and held face-‐to-‐face in Swedish. This facilitated when all interviewees were Swedish-‐speaking. The places for the interviews were in conference rooms between 14 – 18 mars at level three, five and six at Trygg-‐Hansa’s headquarter in Stockholm. Semi-‐structured interviews mean that an interview guideline is developed in advanced and contains several conversation topics and only open-‐ended questions are used (Blomkvist & Hallin, 2014). By using the same interview guideline in all interviews, it enables the empirics to be compared with each other in order to find patterns in terms of similarities and differences. The main advantage of using semi-‐structured interviews is that they can provide reliable and comparable qualitative data as well as the ability to identify and explore new ways of understanding the subject. However, semi-‐structured interviews tend to result in deviations from the topic of conversation, which the researcher kept in mind during the interviews in order to control the conversation if the interviewee tend to deviate too much from the question. (Collis & Hussey, 2013) This study aims, among other things, to identify leadership deficiencies within Trygg-‐Hansa. The success of this research depended largely on the ability of employees to share information that highlights leadership deficiencies. If employees had perceived that disclosure of sensitive information might turn negatively against them, it could have meant that they had never revealed the leadership deficiencies, even if they were aware of them. It was therefore important that the researcher spread a sense of trust to the interviewee and made them feel secure about sharing information. This was achieved by beginning each interview with explaining to the interviewee that they remain anonymous in the research.
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All interviews began by informing the interviewee again about the purpose of both the interview and the research as a whole and how the empirics would be used. The interviewee was also given an opportunity to ask questions about the research, in order for them to understand everything regarding the interview and the research. This increased the likelihood of a dedicated participation in the interviews and appropriate responses to the open-‐ended questions. Notes were taken during all eleven semi-‐structured interviews and all interviews were also recorded, with permission from the person who was interviewed. This was done in case that the researcher would misinterpret or miss to take notes on any important information during the interviews. After each interview the researcher listened through each recording in order to correct possible misinterpretations, clarify unclear notes and complement if any essential information were missed taking notes during the interviews. The interviews were supposed to last for 60 minutes, but they varied between 35 and 65 minutes, depending on how much the interviewee talked about the conversation-‐topics. To ensure that the collected data were interpreted correctly, summaries of the interviews were sent back to the interviewees to ensure the validity, however no interviewee returned with messages about misinterpretations. Finally, the collected empirics from the interviews were translated to English, which may be a source of possible errors or misinterpretations. Analysis of the semi-‐structured interviews The "General analytical procedure" is the chosen method to analyze the empirics from the interviews, since it is not limited to a particular data collection method. This analyze method helps the researcher to analyze the data in a systematic way. This analyze method includes three main activities. Data reduction is the first activity, which means that interesting data from the interviews are selected for further analysis. The second activity is to display the data in diagram form. Finally, the third activity is to identify similarities, differences, patterns and deviations in order to draw conclusions from the empirics gathered from the interviews. (Collis & Hussey, 2013) The first step was to separate and remove irrelevant data from relevant data, which were selected from the interviews to be further analyzed. Examples of irrelevant data was, when interviewees otherwise misinterpret the question or provided empirics that was not relevant to the research. Then the relevant data from the interviews were analyzed by a compilation of empirical data in an Excel document. The interview guideline was entered in the leftmost column and the answers of each interviewee were entered to the right in separate columns next to the guideline. Empirical evidence from the first interview was entered into the column closest the interview guideline and empirical data from the last interview was entered into the eleventh column, on the far right in the Excel document. It was created a summary-‐column on the far right, next to the column with the data from interview eleven, in order to analyze and compare all interview data. In the summary-‐column, all similarities, differences and patterns were gathered from all interviews. Finally, the most essential leadership deficiencies from the
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interviews were identified, summarized and linked to findings from previous research and existing theory that emerged during the literature review in order to identify focus areas that would be further investigated in the questionnaire. The identified focus areas were Self-‐awareness, Communication, Leading employees (incl. Coaching, develop employees and inspiring commitment), Manage change and Strategic planning.
4.2.4 Questionnaire
This chapter contains two subchapters; Planning & execution of questionnaire and Analyze of the questionnaire. Planning and execution of questionnaire The questionnaire aims to provide the answer to the first sub-‐research question. Before the questionnaire was created, a plan was made, containing the following:
• What leadership aspects to assess • How long will it take to answer the questionnaire • Who will participate and why • How many teams and employees needs to participate in order to create a fair perception
of the reality • What can the leaders be offered in return in order to convince them to participate in the
questionnaire with their team • What information does the leaders and employees need to know (anonymity) • How will the questionnaire be sent out
All this was discussed and consulted carefully with the supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa before the implementation took place. This was done in order to ensure that all essential aspects were considered in advance. There are two well-‐established leadership questionnaires, used to assess leadership at various levels within organizations (Benchmarks for Managers and the Skillscope), both developed by CCL (Center of Creative Leadership). These questionnaires are developed to assess leadership in general. This research investigates leadership during organizational changes, which places, particularly high demands on communication and the ability to manage change, coaching employees and strategic planning (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012). These areas are examined on a vague general level in the two questionnaires developed by CCL. Thus, the two questionnaires were considered to be insufficient to use as the questionnaire for this research. It was therefore assessed that it is necessary to develop a questionnaire that investigates leadership for organizational changes instead of leadership in general. The questionnaire in this research was developed by using insights from the semi-‐structured interviews. The questions from the semi-‐structured interviews that indicated deficiencies, based on the interviewees’ perceptions, were chosen for further investigations in the questionnaire. The questions that indicated deficiencies from the interviews corresponded to mainly five leadership areas, those were: Strategic Planning, Lead Employees (including Inspiring
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Commitment, Coaching and Develop Employees), Self-‐Awareness, Communication and Manage Changes. Literature related to these five leadership areas was used in order to concretize and develop new considerations that the respondents would consider in the questionnaire. After discussion with the supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa, ten minutes was considered to be the limit for how long it may take to answer the survey. If it takes longer than that, there is a risk that the response rate is low. The time limit laid the foundations for the number of items to consider. Finally, the questionnaire consisted of 42 considerations. Two considerations within Strategic Planning, nineteen within Lead Employees, two within Self-‐Awareness, eleven within Communication and eight within Manage Change. Ordinal variables were used to measure numerical codes, like for instance 1=weakness and 10=strength. This makes it possible to rank the results (Collis & Hussey, 2013). Respondents were able to grade each consideration between 1-‐10, or ”Do not know” or leave the consideration unanswered. A template of the questionnaire is attached in Appendix C. All teams that participated in the questionnaire were selected together with the supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa. It was discussed, however the whole headquarter would be included in the questionnaire. The HR Department was later included in the discussion as well, in order to help deciding on this issue. HR argued that cost compared to benefits would be too high if the whole headquarter would be included. Therefore, nine teams in total were chosen, which would represent a fair view of the whole headquarter. All members in the chosen teams were supposed to participate in the questionnaire. This is a stratified sampling, which overcomes the problem that a random sample might become over or under represented (Collis & Hussey, 2013). This study would have been sensible for random samples since leadership varies widely from person to person and from department to department. Like for instance, an over representation of a certain leadership due to more samples from a specific department had resulted in that the sample not represent the population. The same teams that participated in the interviews took part in the survey. Furthermore, three additional teams participated as well; the IS Delivery team and two teams within Online – Private. This was done in order to obtain an even broader perception of the leadership deficiencies in the organization. The leaders, for each selected team, were sought up in advance in order to be informed about: the purpose of the questionnaire, how the questionnaire will be conducted, how the results will be used, and what’s in it for them. In order to convince the leaders participate with their teams and thus devote work time from their coworkers to answer the survey, the researcher offered each leader the opportunity to take part of anonymous results from their own team's assessments, presented in a separate report. The leaders appreciated this and all leaders chose to participate. Many leaders have never taken part in such a personal assessment before, which creates a good basis for understanding what parts of the leadership they need to develop. To provide each leader with a separate report, it was required to carry out nine separate surveys. However, creating nine separate reports to the leaders contributed to extra work outside the research, which also limited the ability to conduct a broader survey that included more teams. After the leaders had decided that its employees should participate in the survey, all leaders informed their coworkers about the questionnaire and also urge them to respond. The teams that participated in the questionnaire are presented in the table below.
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Table 5 The teams that participated in the questionnaires
Team [Name]
Team members [#]
Respondents [#]
Response Rate [%]
System Ownership & Strategy 11 11 100 Digital Business Development 4 4 100 Product Development – Enterprise 7 7 100 Product Development – Private 9 9 100 Broker service 12 12 100 Direct Sales – Enterprise 7 7 100 IT Delivery 12 11 92 Online – Private (consisting 2 teams) 9 9 100
Total 71 70 99 The names of the teams are at the far left in the table, total number of team members is placed next to the right side, and thereafter respondents and finally the response rate is at the far right. The two teams at the bottom of the table were the new teams that did not participate in the interviews. The response rate was 100 % in all teams except one; the IT Delivery team had one team member that did not answer. Thus the response rate was 99 % in total. According to Collis & Hussey (2013), it is not uncommon with a response rate of 10 % when conducting a questionnaire in a master thesis. Trygg-‐Hansa uses a licensed program called Artologik, to conduct online-‐based questionnaires within the company. The researcher was recommended by the supervisor at Trygg-‐Hansa to make contact with the person responsible for the program, to get permission in the form of an account name and password. The researcher explained the purpose and the intended use of the software for the responsible person, who granted a license to the researcher via email. Artologik is such a simple program that the user can learn to master it by carrying out trial and error, without any user manual. After about one day spent exploring the program, the researcher had acquired the understanding needed to use the program. When all considerations in the questionnaire were prepared enough, a test version of the questionnaire was sent out via Artologik to all leaders that were going to participate in order for them to help the researcher fine-‐tune all information and considerations to avoid misinterpretations. Feedback was received from four out of nine leaders, which contributed to increased validity (Collis & Hussey, 2013). The researcher got access to all respondents' email addresses via e-‐mail conversations with the leaders of each team. Nine identical questionnaires were sent out, one to each team. Each respondent received an email from Artologik with an explanatory text regarding the questionnaire including the deadline, the purpose of the research and how the results would be used (attached in Appendix B). Furthermore, a link to the survey was found at the bottom of the email. Explaining the purpose of the study helps to increase the response rate (Blomkvist & Hallin, 2014). One reminding email was sent each day to the respondents that had not yet answered the questionnaire. The researcher had to add all the respondents email addresses into Artologik, otherwise it would be impossible to answer the questionnaire even if one have access to the link to the questionnaire. This insured that no one who was not meant to respond could
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respond to the survey and thus give a wrong image of the result. Each year, an employee satisfaction survey is conducted at Trygg-‐Hansa, which means that all respondents are familiar with answering surveys that is carried out through Artologik. This probably contributed to the respondents felt comfortable in answering the survey. After the survey was completed, Artologik generated a report for each survey in the form of results visualized in bar graphs for each consideration with associated comments. In addition, the report generated a mean, min, median and max value for each consideration. Trygg-‐Hansa’s HR department took part of the summary of all the results from the questionnaire. The summary consisted a mean value of all nine leaders’ personal mean value for each consideration, which is the same result as is presented in this report. The result gives the HR department indications of which leadership areas that have, in general, most deficiencies and thus need to be developed and trained. However, all participants (both leaders and respondents) were informed in advance regarding HR’s involvement in the questionnaire. It was crucial to get everyone involved (leaders and respondents) to understand that no personal results would be shared to HR because, in the worst case, it could imply that some leaders would be fired or be reassigned and that was not the purpose of this research. The questionnaire was anonymous, meaning that only the researcher and the leader itself took part of the result from each specific questionnaire that were conducted in each team. Analysis of the questionnaires After all questionnaires were closed, the analysis of the results of the questionnaires began. This chapter explains what, how and why, that was done when the results of the questionnaire was analyzed. There were nine questionnaires in total that was sent out, closed and analyzed. Each questionnaire, were identical and consisted 42 considerations. In order to explain the analysis, a table is presented below that illustrates the logic behind it. The table below only consists three questionnaires and three considerations, which is enough to illustrate the logic of the analysis.
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The text below the table explains the table and the analysis further.
Table 6 Illustration of how the analysis of the questionnaires were conducted
Considerations
Questionnaires
Q1 Q2 Q3 All Q (1-‐9)
C1 Q1C1 Q2C1 Q3C1 AllQC1
Mean Min Max Mean Min Max Mean Min Max Average Mean
Lowest Min
Highest Max SD
C2 Q1C2 Q2C2 Q3C2 AllQC2
Mean Min Max Mean Min Max Mean Min Max Average Mean
Lowest Min
Highest Max SD
C3 Q1C3 Q2C3 Q3C3 AllQC3
Mean Min Max Mean Min Max Mean Min Max Average Mean
Lowest Min
Highest Max SD
All C (1-‐42) -‐ -‐ -‐
AllQAllC Mean of Mean: 7,53
Mean of Min
Mean of Max
Mean of SD
Each questionnaire (Q1, Q2, Q3 in the table above) had, on each consideration (C1, C2, C3 in the table above), a mean value, a min value and a max value, which was automatically generated in the report from Artologik. All mean, min and max values from each questionnaire were compiled in one Excel file in columns between each other, in the same way as is illustrated in the table above. The lowest min and highest max value of all the nine questionnaires for each consideration were compiled to the far right of the table (such as the Lowest Min for AllQC1, the Highest Max for AllQC1, in the table above). Then, the standard deviation was calculated for each consideration (e.g. SD for AllQC1, in the table above), as it provides a complementary understanding of the spread of the results from the nine questionnaires on each consideration. The high value of the standard deviation indicates that the spread of the results from each questionnaire differed more. An average mean value of all questionnaires was calculated for each consideration (e.g. Average Mean for AllQC1, in the table above). Then, a mean value of all average mean values was calculated (Mean of Mean AllQALLC, in the table above). In addition, a mean value of all questionnaires and all considerations were also calculated for the min, max and SD values.
4.3 Unstructured interviews In order to understand the results of the questionnaire, unstructured interviews were conducted with some of the leaders that participated with their teams in the questionnaire. All seven unstructured interviews lasted for one hour each and focused on discussions about the deficiencies of the general results of all questionnaires. The interviews were held in Swedish; due to all interviewees have Swedish as their native language. All interviewees accepted that the
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interviews were recorded to avoid missing any important information. Notes were taken during all the unstructured interviews as well. The unstructured interviews provided an explanation of why some leadership areas have more deficiencies than others. It also facilitated the understanding of which leadership aspects that may me more important than others and why. Furthermore, it provided an explanation of what the organization can do in order to help leaders to rectify the leadership deficiencies. This facilitated for the discussion of the results of the questionnaires as well as the answering of the second sub-‐research question. Leaders from the following teams participated in these interviews:
• System Ownership & Strategy • Digital Business Development • Product Development – Enterprise • Product Development – Private • Direct Sales – Enterprise
In addition, the supervisor, which is the leader of both the leaders of System Ownership & Strategy and Digital Business Development were interviewed. Finally, the supervisors’ leader (who is a part of the board of directors at Trygg-‐Hansa) was interviewed regarding the results of the questionnaire as well. The results from these interviews are not presented in the result chapter, but are instead used to provide inputs together with literature to the analysis and discussion of the results of the questionnaire in chapter “6.2 Analysis and discussion of the questionnaires”.
4.4 Validity and reliability Validity concerns how accurate the conclusions drawn from the study describes the investigated phenomenon. The choice of data collection and analysis methods were continuously revised in order to increase validity. For instance, during the research, it was perceived that un-‐structured interviews with leaders were necessary to add as a data collection method in order to enhance the understanding of the questionnaire results and facilitate the analysis and discussion of the results of the questionnaires. This means that another data collection method was added during the research in order to obtain a more accurate result, which contributed to increased validity. (Blomkvist & Hallin, 2014) Reliability concerns how accurate the measurements within the research are conducted. The research is reliable if the same result is obtained from measurements by conducting the same study again. Reliability is considered less important in social scientific researches, because the focus is on the quality of the collected data and not on the precision of the measurement (Blomkvist & Hallin, 2014). There is a risk that the respondents misinterpret the questions in the questionnaire, this contributes to that they answer something that they are not supposed to answer. This in turn contributes to inaccurate results on that question. In order to avoid this, the questionnaire was sent out to all leaders that were going to participate with their team in the questionnaire so that they could read through all the questions and provide constructive feedback before it was sent out to the respondents. The leaders provided the researcher with
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constructive feedback on unclear questions that the researcher clarified before the questionnaire was sent to the respondents. This increased the reliability. The validity and reliability of this research increased by data-‐ and methodological triangulation. Data triangulation increases the validity and reliability by collecting data from different sources at different times. Methodological triangulation has also increased the validity and reliability since several data collection methods were used; un-‐structured and semi-‐structured interviews, questionnaires and document gathering. (Collis & Hussey, 2013)
4.5 Generalizability This chapter discusses the generalizability both within the case company and to other companies. The generalizability within the company There were 70 respondents in the questionnaires, 11 semi-‐structured and 7 unstructured interviews in this research and there are around 700 employees at Trygg-‐Hansa’s headquarter in Stockholm and 1700 employees at Trygg-‐Hansa in total. It had probably been optimal to involve more teams, interviewees and respondents in order to generalize the results of the sample size to the whole population within the company. This would create a better overall view, which would have been more representative for the whole company. Furthermore, Collis & Hussey (2013) argue that it requires a sample of 248 respondents in order to generalize the results on a population of 700 people and it would require a sample of 322 to be able to generalize the results on a population of 2000, which is approximately the same as the whole Trygg-‐Hansa. Thus, it is not even sufficient with 90 people to generalize the results on the population of Trygg-‐Hansa’s headquarters. However, Collis & Hussey (2013) also argue that selecting a sufficiently large sample may not be essential in order for the results to be generalized since a higher degree of uncertainty in the conclusion is acceptable in master thesis compared to PhD’s. In addition, this research mainly investigates the leadership level closest to the coworkers. It would probably have been more appropriate to assess all leadership levels to be able to generalize the results on the whole company. However, a wide perspective of the leadership has been obtained in this research since so many kinds of teams have been assessed, 9 teams in total, all between support functions and customer related departments. This probably suggests that the results may be generalized on the lowest level of the leadership within Trygg-‐Hansa. The generalizability to other companies and industries The generalizability to other companies both within the same industry and within other industries is restricted. This is due to all companies have different structure, culture, knowledge, experiences and conditions. It is not certain that this result and recommended solution can be applied to other companies. However, empirics indicated that the leadership deficiencies within Trygg-‐Hansa are similar to the leadership deficiencies found in the literature review for both organizations in general and for organizations that facing change. Hence, it may be reasonable that other companies would have similar strengths and weaknesses on a general level, in such cases the results could partly be generalizable to other companies in some extent. However, this
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research goes further and investigates the leadership deficiencies in more detail. In this research it is apparent how much leadership skills can differ between two leaders within the same company even if both have had been trained in the same leadership educations within the same company at the same time. If leadership skills differ widely between two leaders within the same company, leadership skills would probably differ even more between two companies. This makes it difficult to generalize the results and conclusions to other companies even if it is within the same industry and generalize the results to companies within other industries is probably even more difficult.
4.6 Ethics Scientific work has to follow ethical codes on a national level. In Sweden, the most common codes within social science are Swedish Research Council’s principles of ethical research in the humanities and social science. The Swedish Research Council’s paper has to meet the four following requirements (Blomkvist & Hallin, 2014):
• The information requirement • The consent requirement • The confidentiality requirement • The good use requirement
The information requirement was fulfilled in the following way; before the interviews and questionnaires were carried out, all interviewees and respondents were informed about this research’s purpose both orally and via email. The consent requirement was fulfilled due to that interviewees or respondents were asked if they wanted to participate in this research by being studied through interviews or questionnaires (Blomkvist & Hallin, 2014). In order to obtain more sensible and relevant empirics during the data collection, which facilitates the identification and solving of the problem, all respondents, interviewees and leaders that have been studied are anonymous in this research. Therefore the confidentiality requirement was fulfilled only by using empirical results from interviews and questionnaires confidentially. The empirics were only used for the purpose that was informed to interviewees and respondents, which implies that the good use requirement was fulfilled. Furthermore, in order to avoid plagiarism, all quotes and references in this paper was used with caution. (Blomkvist & Hallin, 2014).
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5 Results
This chapter presents the results from the semi-‐structured interviews and the questionnaire.
5.1 Results from the semi-‐structured interviews This chapter presents findings from the semi-‐structured interviews, which aims to provide a better understanding for what need to be further assessed in the questionnaire. This means that this chapter focuses to provide a better understanding of the first sub-‐research question. This chapter is divided into three sub-‐chapters: Leading oneself, Leading others and Leading the organization.
5.1.1 Leading oneself
This sub-‐chapter consists the following considerations: Prioritize, Time management, Knowledge of their role, Knowledge of the company, Fast learner, Result oriented, Ambition, Drive, Productive, Availability, Weigh responsibility, Handling of pressure, Handling of setbacks, Optimistic, Reliable, Self-‐awareness, utilizes strengths, Compensating for weaknesses, Self development, Seeking feedback and Receptivity to feedback. Leader’s ability to prioritize depends on where the task is coming from, the higher up the corporate hierarchy, a task is pushed down from, the higher it is prioritized, and rules and regulations set priorities as well. When it comes to leaders’ time management, the interviewees have a wide range of perceptions; some explain that they found it difficult to explain, others said their leader works hard to meet deadlines. Regarding knowledge about the role, some believe that it is seldom one leader that is perfect for the role as a leader; many have shortcomings regarding knowledge about what tasks their team is managing. However, this aspect varies a lot, some leaders are relatively new in their role and thus lack knowledge about their team’s tasks. Others believe their manager has great experiences of their team’s tasks. Regarding knowledge about the company, all interviewees perceive that their leader has a lot of knowledge about the company since most of the leaders have worked in the company for a long time. Most of them have a good overall picture and the leaders know many people well within the company and thus can recommend whom employees should turn to in order to get help to solve various problems. According to leaders ability to be a fast learner, the opinions are scattered. Some said that this is a shortcoming because of lack of time. Some said it works well. One interviewee said that the immediate leader is slow to learn due to lack of interest. Some said that their leader does not know much since the leader is new in its role, but she is curious and interested in learning more
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about her coworkers’ tasks and also a fast learner, this interviewee expressed: “our current leader have learned more about our teams tasks in the previous 3 weeks than our last boss learned during a half year”. The very most of the interviewees perceive their leaders to be result-‐orientated, which the interviewees perceives as natural since RSA, the owner of Trygg-‐Hansa is listed company that requires short-‐term results. Regarding ambition and drive, this aspect also varies a lot from leader to leader. Some interviewees experienced their leader to totally lack drive and ambition. Other believes that their leader have high ambition and drive which is reflected in the team. Some of the interviewees feel that many tasks should have been done yesterday, thus work becomes more optimistic than realistic, and sometimes too short time is allocated for work. Some of the interviewees planning their work independently and therefore have no idea about their manager's ability to reschedule. Some perceive their managers as being sure to keep deadlines. The interviewees perceive leaders productivity varies widely and becomes clear from interviewee quotes: “often in meetings”, “all right”, “hard to assess”, “good”, and “efficient”. Leaders availability seems to be good, as interviewees’ experiences that leaders always take times for coworkers when they need to discuss something. Some interviewees pointed out that their managers are available around the clock, during the hours when they not are at work, they always answers the phone. Leaders ability to consider how much responsibility to take on is considered as well balanced. Many do not want to take on more responsibility than they already have, because there is a tendency that people make use of one. Two interviewees think their leaders take on much responsibility, more than they need. Some interviewees think their leader try to reduce unnecessary tasks for their team in order to concentrate on tasks that really concerns them in order for leaders to perform well. Regarding leaders ability to handle stress, one of the interviewees claims that it is individual and is highly depended on leader's competence. The notion that leaders ability to manage stress varies between individuals is also reflected in the other interviews. Some interviewee explained that their leader works well under high tempo, but have never experienced that the leader has been stressed. Another interviewee explained that their leaders helps to prioritize employees' tasks during stressful situations, but when it becomes too much at the same time there is a tendency to tunnel vision occurs. Some interviewees explained that their leader handles stress well and in a good way. Another feel that their leader is easily stressed, especially when it comes pressure from the top management. The leader gets stressed when it is difficult to meet deadlines. It may be because the leader is relatively new in the role and lack the knowledge and experience of the group's work. One experience that their leaders feel unwell under high stress. The leader is never unpleasant, but keeps the emotions within. Some argue that it is visible when the leader gets stressed, but it does not affect the mood.
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When it comes to handling adversity, most of the interviewees have no example or perceives that is difficult to assess. Some of the interviewees perceive their leader is supporting when setbacks occur and helps the team to analyze what went wrong and how to avoid getting into the same situation again. According to leaders’ optimism, some interviewees claim that the working climate is more realistic than optimistic. Others think their leader’s optimism is at a good level. One interviewee perceives the leader sees and focus more on difficulties instead of possibilities. Some experience their leader is very optimistic and focuses on opportunities instead of obstacles. The optimism is perceived as good because it spreads to the team and makes them grow. Leader’s ability to be reliable keeps a good level, in general. Some find it difficult to assess that aspect. Some perceive it just works fine, but find it difficult to transform thoughts into words and describe and explain why. Others experience that their leader is highly reliable since he or she always keeps its word and that coworkers can say what they want to the leader without risking the leader spreads it to other employees. Some think their leader is reliable since he or she comes in time and does what is promised and is always contactable either in person, by mail or phone, no matter when. The majority of the respondents feel that their leaders have a good self-‐awareness. One interviewee thinks that leader’s self-‐awareness has deficiencies and another has no perception. Regarding a leader's ability to take advantage of their strengths, some perceive it is good, but find it difficult to explain, one perceives their leader’s strengths are not visible and some have no perception. A few believes their leader knows their own strengths and use them well, otherwise through the ability to lead and support their employees with advice, knowledge and experience or otherwise by supporting the team by spreading a positive feeling that everything can be solved. Regarding leader's ability to compensate for their own weaknesses, the majority of the respondents finds it difficult to answer, which is reflected in the replies. The following are quotes from the interviews: ”missing”, ” well, so so”, ”it is good”, ”pass”, ”well…”, ” do not know” and ”difficult to answer”. However, some interviewees experience their leader has a good ability to delegate tasks to employees that he or she does not know and thus compensates for its own weaknesses. According to leaders' capacity for self-‐development, most of the respondents experience that their leader talks with the team about finished projects and tasks in order to understand what went wrong, how can we avoid it and what can be improved for next time. One found it difficult to answer and one perceives that the leader avoid talking about mistakes. Only one of six leaders that have been assessed during the interviews are searching for feedback on their own performances in order to know what they can improve.
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Most of the leaders seem to be open to listen to feedback from others and try to change themselves accordingly, even if they do not search for feedback actively.
5.1.2 Leading others
This sub-‐chapter contains the following considerations: Search information, Communicate important information, Negotiation, Confrontation, Conflict resolution, Build relationships, Recruit, Delegate, Listen to other’s ideas, Organize people, Clarify employee’s role. Mentor, and Motivate. When it comes to leaders ability to search for information from coworkers, yoursay is carried out annually, which is a formal survey where employees provide feedback. It feels like yoursay are conducted because it has to, rather than the company takes into account what employees think. Regarding the leaders search for information from coworkers, it varies a lot from leader to leader, according to the interviewees, but the majority experiences that their leaders actively searches for information from them. Three of the eleven interviewees said that it has never happened that my boss asked me for information, rather the contrary, it is I who must seek out my boss to inform him about the things he needs to know, two of these three interviewees have the same leader. Regarding to communicate important information to coworkers that concerns coworkers, some of the interviewees perceived that they get information late, while some said that they think the information is unclear since it is not explained well enough, and some perceive this works really well; some get information via e-‐mail, others have meetings once a week with their leaders where they informs about everything essential. Regarding negotiating with individual and group about roles and resources, the majority perceives their manager are prioritizing aspects that is good for both business and the team first, but also listen to the team and take into account employees thoughts and perspectives. According confrontation, this aspect seems to be individual and varies from leader to leader, some leaders are afraid to confront employees when they need to, and are instead sending unclear message to all coworkers in the group. Regarding conflict resolution, interviewees experience that leaders sometimes does not convince their employees why a certain decision is taken, thus leaders looses employees’ motivation. However, according to most of the interviewees, conflicts are seen as unusual and most of the employees have no experience of conflicts at Trygg-‐Hansa. Many interviewees perceive that many leaders are building relationships with “right” people in order to improve their own positions instead. Leaders are also seen as prestige less and good at building relationships. When it comes to recruiting appropriate employees to the team, most of the interviewees think that leaders recruit appropriate talents that fill a certain role in the team and create a balance of competence with existing coworkers. This aspect seems to work well, since it is crucial for
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leaders to recruit talents in order to succeed with their own goals. In addition, some of the interviewees have no experience of leaders recruiting new employees to the team and can thus not explain how it works. One of the interviewees thinks that employees have been recruited rather because of less people applying for the role than because of their talents. Regarding delegation, some perceives that this is solved naturally, tasks are delegated to people with the right knowledge and experiences, and employees are asked before the task is delegated in order to ensure that the employee have enough time to complete the task before the deadline. Leaders are actively delegating tasks that they other vice lack time or lack knowledge and experiences of in order to complete the task themselves. However, some interviewees believe that their leaders can delegate more, since it creates engagement when the leader shows that they trust the coworkers. Leader’s ability to listen to others ideas are according to all interviewees good, employees are not afraid of expressing their thoughts. Even if leader listens well to employees’ ideas, it can be difficult to implement an idea if it affects other parts of the organization. One interviewee experience that the leaders listens, but does not take into account coworker’s ideas because the leader already has a preconceived idea of what is the best approach. Regarding organizing and manage employees, some interviewee explains that the project goes always first, which means that employees are forgotten, which in turn results in sick leaves, in the worst case. Others experience their managers as thoughtful and paying attention to people, as well as they care about their employees. As additional comments, some of the interviewees also feel that priorities in their daily work can be blurred, due to the leader being unclear, which slows down and complicates the employees’ work. Regarding leader’s ability to act as mentor and help coworkers to develop themselves, some interviewees perceive that their leaders lack this ability since they never have experienced this at all. Others experience that their leader takes time for career planning together with the employees, and discuss what their goals are and what they need to do in order to achieve them. One interviewee emphasize that their leader can provide support in their daily work since the leader has previous experience of the role. Another interviewee believes that in order to provide good mentorship to coworkers, leaders need a broad foundation of competence, but it is in general a crucial flaw within Trygg-‐Hansa. According to leaders ability to motivate, some think their leader lack the ability to explain why a certain decision is made and thus employees’ motivation decreases. Some experience that they do not get praised when they have done a hard work and thus lack motivation. Some perceive that their leaders lack engagement. Others feel motivation since their leader provides them with praise. Some perceive that their leader has a lot of engagement which contagious on the team.
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5.1.3 Leading the organization This sub-‐chapter contains the following considerations: Organize and manage projects, Coming up with new ideas, Decision making on improvement/changes and Strategic understanding. When it comes to organizing and manage projects, most of the interviewees explained that most of the time coworkers plans their agenda by themselves and that their leaders not is involved. Regarding leaders to come up with new ideas, there seems to be few similarities according to the interviews. Some believed that optimal results is achieved if the leader listens to employees’ ideas as much as possible, since employees have more insights on what can be improved in their daily work than the leader. One interviewee believes that the leader can improve this aspect and another think their leader already performs well. Some interviewees perceive that their leader tries hard to come up with new ideas all the time; anyhow some are good and some bad. According to the first assessment in this category: making decisions on improvements and changes, implementing decisions, following up decisions – the perceptions varied a lot. Some interviewee experiences that their leaders doesn’t follow up decisions. Others perceive that it is unclear who owns the responsibility for certain decisions, which are linked to employees' work. Some think this aspect works well, like for instance if the team have discussed that something needs to be changed in order to facilitate something for the team, the leader drives it through and makes sure that the change is implemented. The majority of the interviewees points out that decision making is perceived as relatively slow since coworkers’ decisions often affect other parts of the organization and must thus be anchored before the decision is made and implemented. As additional comments, some interviewees declared that their managers have difficulty in interpreting what the organization’s strategic direction means for their team.
5.2 Results from the questionnaires This chapter presents results from the questionnaire. This chapter aims to provide an answer to the first sub-‐research question, since it consists the results from the respondents’ ratings on all considerations and on each leadership characteristic that is assessed (Strategic Planning, Lead Employees, Self-‐Awareness, Communication and Manage Change). Totally 9 teams participated in the questionnaire where the respondents rated their own leader on 5 various leadership characteristics; Strategic Planning, Lead Employees, Self-‐Awareness, Communication and Manage Change. The 9 teams consisted of 71 employees in total, but 1 of them chose not to respond, thus there were 70 respondents in total. There were answer options between 1 and 10, where 1 equivalent to weakness and 10 corresponds to the strength of the leader or manager. There was an additional option for respondents that felt they have no perception of the issue; "Do not know".
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The tables below presents the headline of the leadership characteristic on the top and from left to the right are the following information presented: number of consideration, the consideration, number of respondents that answered the question (max=70), number of declined answers (Decline to Answer in the tables below represent both respondents that did not answer on a certain consideration as well as those respondents that answered ”Do not know” on the considerations), mean value, min value, max value and standard deviation. At the bottom of the table are the average value for the specific characteristics and the average value for the whole questionnaire. The results in this chapter are mainly presented in the tables. The text below the tables explains the values of each leadership category compared to the average. In addition, the most remarkable mean, min and max values of the considerations are highlighted in the text below the tables as well. This chapter is divided into the sub-‐chapters, Leading oneself, Leading others and Leading the organization.
5.2.1 Leading oneself
This sub-‐chapter contains Self-‐Awareness. The table below displays the leadership characteristic: Self-‐Awareness, which consists of two considerations.
Table 7 The results of the leadership characteristic: Self-‐Awareness
Self-‐Awareness
# To consider/Consideration Responses
Decline to
Answer Mean Min Max SD
1 My manager is actively looking for constructive feedback on own performances from me 65 5 5,98 3,7 8,6 1,4
2 My manager listens to my constructive criticism and improve one selves 47 23 7,17 5,5 9,2 0,9
1-‐2 Average of Self-‐Awareness 56 14 6,58 4,6 8,9 1,1
1-‐42 Average of the whole Questionnaire 65,2 4,8 7,53 6,0 9,0 0,5 This leadership category aimed to assess leaders Self-‐Awareness. Nearly one third (23/70 ≈ 33%) of respondents chose not to answer consideration number two. This is significantly higher than the average for the whole questionnaire (4,8/70 ≈ 7%). The whole questionnaire means that all nine questionnaires have been compiled. The first consideration’s mean value was 5,98 and is the second lowest of the whole questionnaire. The average mean value of Self-‐Awareness is 6,58. This is lower than the average for the whole questionnaire: 7,53. The lowest min value within this leadership category was 3,7 (the third lowest min value of the whole questionnaire) and the highest max value was 9,2. The spread between the average min and max values in this leadership category are larger than the average for the whole questionnaire. This contributes to
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higher average SD (standard deviation) within Self-‐Awareness (1,1) compared to the whole questionnaire: 0,5.
5.2.2 Leading others This sub-‐chapter contains Communication and Lead employees. The following table presents the leadership characteristic: Communication. Communication consists eleven considerations.
Table 8 The results of the leadership characteristic: Communication
Communication
# To consider/Consideration Responses
Decline to
Answer Mean Min Max SD
3 My manager explains why there is a need for change within the organization 64 6 7,42 6,6 8,8 0,2
4 My manager explains why there is a need for change within my team 65 5 7,72 6,7 9,3 0,3
5 My manager explains which (e.g. Departments, teams, work processes) within the organization that is affected by the change 64 6 7,13 4,8 9,3 0,6
6 My manager explains which (e.g. Roles, responsibilities, work processes) within my team that is affected by the change 64 6 7,12 5,0 8,3 0,4
7 My manager explains how changes will be implemented within the organization 66 4 6,92 5,5 7,8 0,2
8 My manager explains how changes will be implemented in my team 67 3 7,24 6,0 8,2 0,3
9 My manager is constantly seeking information about my work 68 2 6,89 4,7 9,0 0,7
10 My manager communicates important decisions, initiatives and changes in good time to me 65 5 7,64 6,2 8,6 0,3
11 My manager answers my questions about change in a good way so that I understand 64 6 7,96 7,0 9,0 0,2
12 My manager handles my and my colleagues' resistance to change by explaining convincingly why the change is necessary 64 6 7,51 6,9 9,0 0,3
13 My manager informs on how far the company has reached with the change process 66 4 6,88 4,8 8,5 0,4
3-‐13 Average of Communication 65,2 4,8 7,31 5,8 8,7 0,4 1-‐42 Average of the whole Questionnaire 65,2 4,8 7,53 6,0 9,0 0,5
This leadership category aimed to assess leaders’ skills in Communication. The average responses of this leadership category were the same as for the whole questionnaire: 65,2. The average mean value of Communication was 7,31, which is lower than the average mean for the whole questionnaire: 7,53. The average min value of Communication was 5,8 and the max value was 8,7, which is close, but a little bit lower than the average min (6,0) and max (9,0) values of
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the whole questionnaire. The SD of this leadership category was 0,4. This is lower than the average SD for the whole questionnaire: 0,5. The table below presents the questionnaire results of the leadership characteristic: Lead Employees. Communication consists nineteen considerations.
Table 9 The results of the leadership characteristic: Lead Employees
Lead Employees
# To consider/Consideration Responses
Decline to
Answer Mean Min Max SD
14 My manager is clear about the responsibilities that my job comprise 70 0 7,16 6,6 8,7 0,4
15 My manager sets reasonable demands on me 69 1 7,72 7,1 8,5 0,1 16 My manager believes in me 65 5 8,50 7,4 9,7 0,2 17 My manager listens to me 68 2 8,44 7,2 9,5 0,2 18 My manager shows interest in my work 69 1 7,61 5,7 9,0 0,5 19 My manager treats me with respect 70 0 8,77 7,6 9,8 0,2
20 My manager has empathy and care about my well-‐being 69 1 8,51 7,4 9,3 0,2
21 My manager discusses my career goals with me 66 4 6,83 4,0 8,9 0,9
22 My manager helps me to develop a plan for how to achieve my career goals 64 6 6,23 3,6 8,8 1,2
23 My manager gives me challenging assignments and the opportunity to grow 66 4 7,54 6,0 9,1 0,5
24 My manager gives me constructive feedback on what I can improve 68 2 7,03 5,3 8,9 0,4
25 My manager encourages me with praise for my work 68 2 7,40 5,9 8,5 0,4
26 My manager act as advisor to me in my work when I ask for it 64 6 8,23 6,7 9,3 0,3
27 My manager motivates me 70 0 7,07 6,7 8,8 0,4
28 My manager is straight, open and honest with me 68 2 8,19 6,6 9,3 0,4
29 My manager can speak up to me and my colleagues, if necessary 66 4 7,91 6,6 9,1 0,3
30 My manager shows commitment to his/her work 69 1 8,41 5,8 9,5 0,6
31 32
My manager welcomes an open and constructive dialogue regarding his / her decision My manager has the skills required to lead its team effectively
70 0 7,68 5,4 9,0 0,8
68 2 7,64 6,5 9,1 0,4 14-‐32 Average of Lead Employees 67,7 2,3 7,73 6,2 9,1 0,4 1-‐42 Average of the whole Questionnaire 65,2 4,8 7,53 6,0 9,0 0,5
This leadership category aimed to assess leaders’ ability to Lead Employees. The average responses of Lead Employees were 67,7. This is higher than the average for the whole questionnaire: 65,2. The average mean value of this leadership category was also higher than for
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the average of the whole questionnaire. Consideration number nineteen has the highest max value of the whole questionnaire: 9,8. Remarkable within this category is consideration number twenty-‐one and twenty-‐two, since those mean and min values are significantly lower than the rest within Lead Employees. The mean value of consideration number twenty-‐one was 6,83 and the min value was 4,0, which both are the fourth lowest of the whole questionnaire. The mean value of consideration twenty-‐two was 6,23 and is the third lowest of the whole questionnaire. The min value of the same consideration was 3,6 and is the second lowest min value of the whole questionnaire. In addition, the average of the min (6,2) and max (9,1) values within this category is higher and the average min (6,0) and max (9,0) values of the whole questionnaire. In addition, the average SD of Lead Employees (0,4) is lower than the SD average of the whole questionnaire: 0,5.
5.2.3 Leading the organization
This sub-‐chapter contains manage change and strategic planning. The next table shows the leadership characteristic: Manage Change, consisting eight considerations.
Table 10 The results of the leadership characteristic: Manage Change
Manage Change
# To consider/Consideration Responses
Decline to
Answer Mean Min Max SD 33 My manager is positive towards change 61 9 8,74 8,0 9,4 0,1
34 My manager involves me so that I may participate and influence the change’s meaning within the team I belong 64 6 7,60 6,0 9,3 0,4
35 My manager shows understanding and supportive during changes 62 8 7,81 6,8 9,3 0,3
36 My manager is committed to change 65 5 8,39 7,0 9,2 0,2 37 My manager is active throughout the change 57 13 7,77 5,8 9,5 0,5
38 My manager drives the changes within the team I belong 61 9 7,47 5,3 9,1 0,7
39 My manager completes the changes and ensure that they remain 55 15 7,46 5,7 9,0 0,5
40 My manager ensures that we celebrate successful change within our team 62 8 5,87 3,4 8,6 1,2
33-‐40 Average of Manage Change 60,9 9,1 7,64 6,0 9,2 0,5 1-‐42 Average of the whole Questionnaire 65,2 4,8 7,53 6,0 9,0 0,5
This leadership category aimed to assess leaders’ ability to Manage Change. The average responses in Manage Change were 60,9, which is lower than the average of the whole questionnaire: 65,2. The average mean value was 7,64 and is higher than the average of the whole questionnaire: 7,53. All mean values within this leadership category are around 7,53 or higher except consideration forty that has the mean value 5,87, which is the lowest mean value
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of the whole questionnaire. The same consideration had also the lowest min value of the whole questionnaire: 3,4. The average min and max values for this category are quite similar to the average of the whole questionnaire. The average SD for Mange Change is the same as for the whole questionnaire. The following table displays the results of the leadership characteristic: Strategic Planning, which consists two considerations.
Table 11 The results of the leadership characteristic: Strategic Planning
Strategic Planning
# To consider/Consideration Responses
Decline to
Answer Mean Min Max SD
41 My manager has the ability to interpret the company's overall strategy for the team I belong 65 5 7,68 6,6 8,7 0,2
42 My manager involves me to discuss what must be done in our team to contribute to the company's strategic objectives 70 0 7,10 4,8 9,3 0,8
41-‐42 Average of Strategic Planning 67,5 2,5 7,39 5,7 9,0 0,5 1-‐42 Average of the whole Questionnaire 65,2 4,8 7,53 6,0 9,0 0,5
This leadership category aimed to assess leaders’ ability to conduct Strategic Planning. The average responses for Strategic Planning were 67,5. This is higher than the average of the whole questionnaire: 65,2. The average mean value was 7,39 and is lower than the average for the whole questionnaire: 7,53. The spread between the average min (5,7) and max (9,0) values of Strategic Planning are larger than the spread between the average min (6,0) and max (9,0) values of the whole questionnaire. The average SD of Strategic Planning (0,5) is the same as the average of the whole questionnaire.
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6 Analysis and discussion of the results
This chapter presents the analysis of the results from the semi-‐structured interviews and the questionnaire.
6.1 Analysis and discussion of the semi-‐structured interviews This chapter aims to provide a better understanding of what needs to be further assessed in the questionnaire in order to answer the first sub-‐research question. Furthermore, input from the literature are taken into account and used for the discussion regarding what the organization can do in order to rectify the identified leadership deficiencies. This provides a foundation to the answer of the second sub-‐research question. This chapter consists an analysis and discussion about the results from the interviews in the same order as it was structured in the result chapter: Leading oneself, Leading others and Leading the organization. Theory is linked to the analysis to support insights. The literature that is used to confirm insights may come from all different parts of the literature review since the analysis aims to find the root of the problem. For example, to confirm insights of the results in the leading others section, literature belonging to personnel leading oneself may be used. This is because the cause of the problem, for example, having problem with lead employees, may depend on the leader's personal goals or motivation, which belongs to the leading the oneself chapter in the literature review.
6.1.1 Leading oneself This sub-‐chapter discusses the results of the following considerations: Prioritize, Time management, Knowledge of their role, Knowledge of the company, Fast learner, Result oriented, Ambition, Drive, Productivity, Availability, Weigh responsibility, Handle pressure, Handle setbacks, Optimistic, Reliable, Self-‐awareness, utilize strengths, Compensate for weaknesses, Self development, Seek feedback and Receptivity to feedback. Leaders’ prioritizing depends on, according to results from the interviews, which level in the corporate hierarchy the initiative derives from. The higher the initiative derives from, the higher priority. In addition, leaders can help coworkers prioritizing when they have problems doing that themselves, but it requires leaders to have fundamental knowledge of coworkers’ role and duties, which all of them do not have. There is a clear logic in prioritizing initiatives that derives from the higher part of the corporate hierarchy first, but leaders can facilitate their ability to help coworkers prioritizing by improving their knowledge about the team. This falls back on leaders’ willingness to learn, which is connected to their personal interests and goals and is called intrinsic and identified motivation (Graves et al., 2016). If leaders are interested they will probably try to learn more and thus be able to help coworkers prioritizing in a better manner. Thus, organizations’ ought help leaders to adjust their tasks and role, according to their interests, since it elicit leaders’ intrinsic motivation (Banks, 1997). Identified motivation means
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leaders have career goals they want to achieve, which becomes their motivation. To achieve their own career goals they need to perform well. They can perform by helping coworkers to perform. For instance, leaders may increase coworkers’ performances by helping them to set right priorities. In order for leaders to do that, they may need to increase their knowledge, and thus the leaders’ personal career goals become their motivation to learn. Regarding leaders’ ability to manage time, some interviewees perceive that coworkers get information about what need to be done too late, meaning that the project become rather optimistic than realistic. Some interviewees explain their leaders to plan their own schedule well and being accurate to deadlines. Some interviewees perceive their leader has difficulties doing time management due to too poor knowledge about the team’s tasks and thus delegate time management to coworkers in the team instead. Leaders’ time management ability seems to vary from leader to leader, and in some extend depend on their knowledge about their team’s work. However, this aspect varies a lot from leader to leader, according to results from the interviews, and for some leaders there seems to be improvement potential, but in general this aspect seems to work fine. In addition, employees perceive Trygg-‐Hansa’s decision-‐making process as relatively slow since many decision needs to be anchored in various parts of the organization before making the final decision. This does not necessarily need to be associated with a drawback, and it is confirmed during the second interview. The interviewee describes that there have been occasions when decisions that affect other teams has been taken without anchoring with other teams that will be affected, which in hindsight has proved to cause problems for those teams and therefore this has resulted in extra work to fix the problems. Even if the decision-‐making process is slow due to need of anchoring, it seems to be necessary in order to prevent extra work. When it comes to leaders’ knowledge in their role, according to the results from the interviews, many leaders have shortcomings as they have poor knowledge of what their team works with and therefore there are improvement potential. Some argue that their leader has great knowledge and can act as advisor since the leader have worked in the team before and thus have experience. Leaders knowledge and experience about the team facilitates for the leaders to act as an advisor to the coworkers. It seems in general, according to the results from the interviews, that leaders have shortcomings in this aspect. The time it takes for a person to build knowledge and relevant experience depends heavily on the person's interest in the subject being studied. This is confirmed by McCombs (1991), that argues the connection between the subject and peoples’ personal interests and goals are crucial aspects to facilitate learning (McCombs, 1991). Regarding leaders’ knowledge about Trygg-‐Hansa as a whole seems to be good according to results from the interviews, since most of the leaders have been within the company for many years. Interviewees perceive that leaders have a fundamental understanding of what different employees at all levels within the company are responsible for, which facilitates when coworkers in the team need guidance for specific help from another team or employee. The general perception is that this aspect is working well as it is and there are more critical aspect to focus on improve.
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When it comes to leaders’ ability to learn fast, interviewees experience their leaders to maintain a high level. One interviewee explains the leaders do not learn fast since he or she seems to not be interested in the team’s tasks. Other interviewees express the opposite that their leader is a fast learner since he or she is curious and interested in learning more about what the team is doing. It seems that curiosity and interest are fundamental for a fast learning. This is also confirmed by McCombs (1991), that argues the connection between the subject and peoples’ personal interests and goals are crucial aspects to facilitate learning (McCombs, 1991). More or less, interviewees perceive their leaders as result-‐oriented. As RSA is a public company that owns Trygg-‐Hansa, they set short-‐term demands for profitability; it is natural that there is a strong focus on results throughout the organization and this is not perceived to be a problem. Regarding leader’s ambition and drive, the spread is large, some leaders have high ambitions and drive, some have low and some in between. Some interviewee describes that their leader lacks engagement and drive and according to the interviewees, the reason is that leaders think the work is not funny and not interesting. An appropriate organizational response to this suggest that the organization support those leader and help them finding internal motivation. This can be achieved if leader’s managers support the leaders and remind them that their contribution brings value to the organization (Ngima & Kyongo, 2013). In addition, leaders’ interests need to be identified which enable tasks can be adjusted accordingly. This means that leaders’ work becomes more personally meaningful and interesting, which creates internal motivation (Williams, 1995). Some interviewees explain that leaders with high ambition and drive is spread those feelings, subconsciously, to the coworkers in the team and get them motivated as well. This is confirmed by Damen (2007), which argues that commitment from leaders is contagious and affects subordinates, resulting in better performance. High ambition and drive seems to be based on leaders’ personal career goals and the willingness to perform at a high level in order to improve their chances of achieving their goals. It is essential that there are opportunities for leaders within the company to be promoted; otherwise there is a risk that the purposeful employees stop fighting and thus stop performing. From the interviews, it is perceived that those leaders that have really high ambition and drive and fights for a better position within the company, find it important that all coworkers in their team have ambitions and goals with their own career as well. It is perceived that these leaders do everything in their power to work towards their goals. This means leaders achieves their own goals by help and encourage employees to better performance. Graves et al (2015) argues leaders with high ambition and career-‐goals are driven by identified motivation, which basically means they work hard to achieve personal goals. Hard working leaders possess large engagement, which spreads to coworkers and creates motivation. When it comes to leaders productivity level, different interviewees describe it with the following quotes: ”varies a lot”, ”it is alright”, ”in meetings too often”, ”difficult to assess”, ”good”, ”efficient”, ”very high”. It is perceived as the interviewees find it difficult to estimate this aspect of the leadership and it is therefore difficult to come up with useful insights more than speculations. However, in general, this leadership aspect seems to be functioning well within the company and thus there are more essential aspect of the leadership that need to be developed.
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Regarding leaders’ availability, some interviewees argue that this aspect works well, since their leader always takes time for coworkers when needed. Leaders’ availability is important for employees in order to feel supported in their work. This leadership aspect seems to work fine across the board, according to the interviewees, even if they found it difficult to describe. There seem to be other aspects of the leadership that are more critical to improve. According to weigh how much responsibility leaders undertake, interviewees explain that many leaders do not want to take on more responsibility than they already have, because there is a tendency to be utilized, but some leaders take on more responsibility than others. Others describe this leadership aspect as “well balanced”, “difficult to assess” and “good ability”. There seems to be a tendency that leaders’ with high ambition and drive takes on more responsibility than others since they want to impress and thus increase their chances for promotion. However, no leadership shortcomings are identified within this aspect. When it comes to leaders’ ability to manage stress/pressure, some interviewees argue it depends on leaders competence level, where vague leader competence leads to higher stress level. In general, interviewees experience their leaders to manage the stress level well and always keep the humor under control. This means that leaders seem to manage, to control their own mood even under high stress and pressure and does not affect coworkers negatively. This is important since Fredrickson argues that humans emotions in general are contagious (Fredrickson, 2003). This means that just as well as positive emotions are correlated to favorable performances and results, negative emotions affects unfavorable performances and results (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005; Brown et al., 1997). Therefore, it is important that leaders do not let stress and pressure affect their own humor negatively, since it then affects coworkers’ humor as well. Regarding leader's ability to be optimistic, there are widespread differences within this aspect. Some interviewees explain that their leader has a good balance between optimism and realistic perspective. According to results from the interviews, some leader focus more on the obstacles than opportunities, while other leaders do the opposite. Some interviewees describe their leader as very optimistic, which they think is good, because it spreads in the team and makes the team grow. The general perception from the interviews is that leaders’ ability to be optimistic and focus on opportunities seems to be positively reflected in the teams. This is similar to the last aspect: optimism is a positive emotion that spreads among people and results in favorable performances and outcomes (Fredrickson, 2003; Lyubomirsky et al., 2005; Brown et al., 1997). Leaders’ capacity to be reliable, are perceived from the results of the interviewees, as otherwise difficult to assess or good, since they arrive in time, working long and hold what they promises. This aspect is difficult to assess since most of the interviewees find it difficult to describe more than just: ”good”. It is essential that leaders are reliable toward coworkers in order to be trusted. However, according to the interview results, leaders in general seem to be reliable within Trygg-‐Hansa, and there are other leadership aspects that are more critical to improve. When it comes to leaders self-‐awareness, this is perceived from one interviewee as difficult to assess and from most of the interviewees as good. This aspect is difficult to assess since most of
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the interviewees find it difficult to describe more than just: ”good”. Self-‐awareness is an important leadership aspect in order to understand what to improve on one self, but according to the interview results, this aspect seems to work fine, and there are other leadership aspects that are more critical to develop. Regarding leaders’ ability to utilize on their own strengths, interviewees describe otherwise that it works fine or that they have no perception. Some interviewees perceive it works fine, but find it difficult to describe what works fine. Others explain that their leader uses its strengths by spreading what he or she is good at, to the team and is positive and find solutions to problems. This leadership aspect is not considered as a deficiency. When it comes to leaders’ ability to compensate for their own weaknesses, interviewees explain that their leader, use help from others or delegate to coworkers if they do not manage to complete a task themselves. According to some interviewee, their leader is relatively new in its role and thus lacks knowledge about the team’s tasks, but they are trying to learn from the coworkers by sitting by and trying their jobs. This leadership aspect seems to work fine since leaders do what it takes to solve the task and get the job done. Leaders capacity for self-‐development, most of the interviewees describes that their leader always review completed projects in order to understand what can be improved for the next one. Being able to admit that a mistake has been made or that something did not really went according to the plan is necessary in order to develop and improve oneself. Hudson (1999) argues for the importance of learning from mistakes in order to evolve, which many leaders at Trygg-‐Hansa seem to do. According to the results of the interviews, this leadership aspect seems to work fine and there are other more critical aspects to develop. According to the first interviewee, yoursay are carried out annually in order to search for feedback from coworkers on what can be improved, but they experiences the organization do not consider the feedback during decision making, which are perceived to be frustrating for employees. However, even if it is impossible to take all feedback from coworkers into consideration, it is crucial that coworkers perceive that yoursay not just is carried out formally, but the company really cares about their coworkers’ thoughts. Banks (1997) argues that leaders and organizations as a whole ought listens to employees’ concerns, since it encourage the growth of employees’ internal motivation. Employees’ internal motivation is connected to both employee satisfaction and commitment, which all affects both product and service quality of the company. Coworkers’ satisfaction is also positive correlated to customer satisfaction, which in turn affect the financial results of a firm (Caterina, 2005). Leaders' ability to actively seek feedback on their own performance seems to be a general shortcoming. Only two interviewees expressed their leader seeks regularly for feedback once in a month without exceptions. In order for leaders to develop themselves, they need to get an objective perspective of what they need to improve. That may be obtained by asking for feedback from coworkers, but most of the leaders, according to the results from the interviews, do not do that. Leslie (2015) argues, organizations may facilitate leaders' self-‐awareness by introducing assessments of leaders. Furthermore, subordinates, peers and bosses ought assess
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leaders. The advantage of collecting opinions from such a broad perspective is that it creates a good general picture of the person's leadership qualities. Best practices and lessons learned can be applied from both inside and outside of the organization. According to results from the interviews, leaders’ seems, in general, have high receptiveness to feedback from coworkers. Interviewees describe that their leaders listens well to coworkers and become influenced by their feedback. As leader communicates the high degree of consideration, such as leaders listens to employees, it contributes to higher job satisfaction and better performances from employees (Bhuiyan, 2010). Therefore, it is suitable that the leader actively listens to employees (Dubinsky et al., 1988). Leslie (2015) argues this is an essential leadership deficiency for organizations in general, but this aspect of the leadership seems to be functioning well within Trygg-‐Hansa and there are more critical aspects to focus on improving.
6.1.2 Leading others
This sub-‐chapter discusses the results of the following considerations: Search information, Communicate important information, Negotiation, Confrontation, Conflict resolution, Build relationships, Recruit, Delegate, Listen to other’s ideas, Organize people, Clarify employee’s role. Mentor, and Motivate. Regarding leaders habit to search information from coworkers, few leaders are doing that on a regular basis according to the interviewees. That may be because of mainly three reasons. Firstly, because of lack of interest in employees’ work, which implies that leaders do not care about what coworkers are doing as long as they get their tasks done in time. Secondly, because of lack of knowledge about what coworkers’ task is all about, which means that even if they ask for information, they cannot make any sense of it since they do not understand what the information indicates on and therefore refrain from asking. Thirdly, because of lack of ambition and personal goals; leaders with no or low ambitions care less about their own and team’s performances compared to peers with high personal ambitions and goals. If leaders do not care about their own performances, they do not care about their employees’ performances either, thus they stop asking for information from coworkers. According to results from interviews, the contrast is clear between leaders who search information, compared with leaders who not search information from their employees regularly. In cases where leaders actively seek information from employees, the leader seems to have a greater commitment, care more about their own and the whole team’s performances in a genuine manner and therefore try constantly to come up with new improvement opportunities by listening to coworkers. Leaders that search for information from their coworkers seems to, according to interviewees, be driven and motivated by fulfilling their own career goals and thus work hard in order to achieve them, which is called identified motivation (Graves et al., 2016). Leaders that are driven by identified motivation work hard and do everything in their power to meet its goals and leave nothing left to chance, which is the explanation why these leaders search for information from coworkers. Regarding leaders to communicate important information that concerns coworkers’ role, many interviewees feel that it takes a while before they get the information from their leaders, in some teams, the employees have to seek for information from their leader themselves and some think
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there is a potential for improvement in this aspect. Creasey & Hiatt (2012) argues that leaders usually have shortcomings in communicating important information to coworkers, since leaders time to time do not know what, how and when to communicate essential information. However, this shortcoming may be due to leaders' schedules mainly consists meetings and takes most of their time at work, which means that they have to prioritize tasks and therefore informing employees may be forgotten or not prioritized. According to leaders’ capacity to negotiate with individuals and groups about roles and resources, interviewees describe this aspect in various ways. Some explain that their leader find an appropriate balance between doing what is best for the team versus doing what is best for the business. Some describe that it works well, some perceive their leader listen well to the team and some experience that there are good ideas, but there is a lack of resources (e.g. Competence, time) to implement them. The general perception is that there are more critical leadership aspects than this one. When it comes to leaders’ ability to confront coworkers, some interviewees perceive it works well, since leaders are objective in the confrontation. Some perceive that the leader does whatever it takes to solve the problem even uncomfortable discussions containing constructive criticism to employees. However, one interviewee experience their leader as afraid of hurting someone and thus afraid of having uncomfortable discussions. Furthermore, it is perceived that motivated and result-‐oriented leaders with drive, engagement, ambition and career-‐goals, do whatever it takes to solve the occurred problem even if it includes uncomfortable discussions containing constructive criticism to coworkers. Leaders that lack these characteristics seem to avoid these kind of uncomfortable discussions with coworkers. Graves et al (2016) call this identified motivation, which basically means employees achieving personal goals through hard work. Regarding leaders to manage conflicts, some interviewees perceive their leader as not afraid of handling conflicts, some experience that conflicts are unusual, but some perceive that their leader is afraid to manage conflicts. However, within Trygg-‐Hansa, it seems to be a lot of progressive employee that wants to contribute to success for the company so employees are trying to solve things together with each other and do whatever is best for the company. Therefore, in general, it is unusual with conflicts and thus there are more critical leadership aspects than this one. When it comes to leaders’ ability to build relationship with other people within the company such as coworkers, peers and managers above them, one interviewee describe this process as ”building relationships is all about keeping up well with the right people to create good conditions for a bright future”. Some additional interviewees emphasize the same as the quote in the previous sentence, but with different words. One employee perceives that leaders find it easier to build relationships with employees above them than below them. Others describe their leader as prestige less, find it easy to talk and build relationships with employees at all different levels and that it feels like the leaders are on the same level as the coworkers. Some employees may experience it as something bad that leaders focus the relationship building to employees above them rather than to employees below them within the corporate hierarchy, but that
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behavior is not strange because employees strengthen their opportunities for a brighter future by doing that way. However, this aspect seems to work fine and is not perceived to be a critical deficiency in the leadership. Regarding recruiting appropriate employees to the team, leaders want to recruit good people to achieve their own goals, but they do not want people who are too strong that takes the control of the team. Most of the interviewees experience this aspect works fine within their team, coworkers in the teams are well balanced between competence, experience and personal characteristics. Some interviewees have no perception regarding this aspect. One interviewee thinks some people have been recruited because of few people applied for the role. Furthermore, interviewees argue that leaders have too less knowledge about the tasks that is carried out by coworkers in the team, meaning that leaders may represent an inaccurate picture of the duties that the employment implies to the applicants. An inaccurate picture of the duties may result in choosing an applicant with less appropriate skills, which affects the team's performance negatively. This implies it puts requirements on leaders’ knowledge about the team in order to handle the recruitment process in the best possible way. An alternative solution to leader’s shortcomings in experiences is to include coworkers in the team in interviews with applicants before employment which one of the interviewees suggests. However, this is not a common problem among the leaders because the vast majority of the interviewees either has no opinion or thinks that this works well. Regarding leaders’ capacity to delegate tasks to coworkers, there is a wide range of perceptions of how leaders are handling this. Some interviewee argues it works fine; much depends on the competency of both individuals in the team and the leader. Some say: it dissolves quite naturally. One interviewee explains that the leader is relatively new in the role and thus do not really know who to delegate to. This means that in some case tasks are delegated to not appropriate team members, according to coworkers’ experiences. Another interviewee experience its leader delegating tasks to only trusted coworkers in the team, but the leader could delegate more tasks to other team member also. It is perceived that some coworkers do not get the chance to show their skills, since their leaders seem to have preconceptions of which coworkers that manages certain tasks. An open discussion with coworkers may be preferable in such situations when leaders find it difficult to know which coworkers that manage to solve which tasks. This means that all team members get the chance to show what they can do, and often it is not only the knowledge itself that determines how well the task is performed, but also the person's motivation and willingness to undertake the task. However, the very most of the coworkers are busy and often congested in their daily work. This means that the delegation does not lend itself, particularly well if it is not fully necessary as in the case where the manager is new to his role and does not handle the task on their own. When it comes to leaders’ ability to listen to others’ ideas, interviewees perceive that leaders in general listen well to the coworkers. Some experience that their ideas are not always taken into account as the ideas often affect other teams and units. This means that the other teams and units need to be involved in the decision-‐making of the idea. This contributes to ideas often going down the drain. One interviewee experience their leader has preconceived ideas of how things shall be conducted and therefore does not embrace employee ideas. Another employee
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describes that their leader raises issues that are discussed within the team and they assess together, whether it is good or bad to implement. When the group is united behind a decision, provided that it is reasonable, the leader does everything in its power to implement it. Coworkers seem to appreciate when leaders do not only listen to them, but also raising issues within the organization that the team wants to improve. This shows that the leader stands up for the team and tries to help coworkers facilitate their daily work. Prosci (2012) argues that leaders’ listening to employees is one essential deficiency within the coaching category of the leadership deficiencies, but according to results from the interviews, it seems not to be a problem within Trygg-‐Hansa. The leaders at Trygg-‐Hansa seem to listen to their employees and do their best to facilitate their daily work even if is it not always possible. Regarding leaders to organize coworkers, one interviewee describes that leader in general lack caring about coworkers’ well-‐being, and instead just focus on the project and the associated deadline, which has resulted in sick leave from coworkers. In contrast, other interviewees describe with happiness their leader’s thoughtfulness. The leader notices if some team member does not feel well and asks about coworkers’ well-‐being, which seems to create happiness among coworkers. Dubinsky (1988) argues that effective leaders possess abilities within both task-‐oriented (initiating structure) and relationship-‐oriented (consideration) behaviors. This means that leaders should not just focus on the task itself, but also care about employees’ well-‐being in order to get satisfied and high-‐performing employees, which is a prerequisite for achieving good outcomes. Leaders do not clarify the scope of employees' responsibilities in their work enough. Creasey & Hiatt (2012) argues it is common that leaders find it difficult to clarify employees’ new role due to lacking understanding of how the change will impact subordinate roles. The reason to the problem seems to be similar at Trygg-‐Hansa. Many changes take place simultaneously and leaders do not get enough information from above to understand what the change implies for their team. The changes within the organization may contribute to changes in the scope of the employee's responsibilities. Therefore, it may be difficult for leaders define the scope of employees’ role. Dubinsky (1988) argues that effective leaders possess abilities within both task-‐oriented (initiating structure) and relationship-‐oriented (consideration) behaviors. Task-‐oriented involves to what degree leaders control subordinates; it includes clarifying the role and responsibilities of employees. As leaders are clear on initiating structure, employees feel less ambiguity in their role and what is expected from them. This contributes to increased commitment to the organization, increased job satisfaction and increased job performance (June, 2011; Srikanth & Jomon, 2013). Leaders’ capacity to act as an adviser, mentor and develop employees varies a lot from leader to leader, according to results from the interviewees. Some interviewees perceive that their leader can develop and improve this aspect, since they experiences that they get no constructive feedback and no advice or guidance at all from their leaders. Mentoring or coaching is essential, since leaders that manage that skill can create increased self-‐awareness among employees and thereby employees’ strengths are maximized and weaknesses minimized. Hence, employees’ performances are enhanced, which is good for both the organization and the coworkers itself (Hill, 2004; Whitmore, 1997). Schwartz (2011) asserts it is appropriate to develop internal
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groups and forums where leaders can exchange experiences, mistakes and what they learned related to lead employees, which includes coaching, in order for leaders to help each other with difficult leadership tasks. Furthermore, it is also appropriate that organizations create a work environment that encourages feedback, and develops guidelines for how feedback should be exchanged. Some interviewees argue that their leader has the ability to provide their coworkers with feedback, but rarely time is taken for this. Others perceive that leader’s ability to provide coworkers with feedback works fine. Some argue that the reason why their leader has the ability to guide them in their daily work is because the leader worked in the team before and thus has the right experiences to lead the team. In addition, a few interviewees explain that their leader helps them to plan how they can improve their work, help them to plan their career, including setting career goals and plan how to achieve them. Graves et al (2015) argues that leaders ought influence coworkers’ commitment and willingness to perform at work by providing coworkers with career planning and development discussions. In that way, leaders can help coworkers to increase their motivation. This implies that employees feel that there is a future within the company worth fighting for. However, leaders’ ability to handle career planning and development discussions varies a lot within Trygg-‐Hansa and there seems to be no standards at all on this aspect, meaning there is room for organizational improvements. Organizations can help leaders to develop this skill by encouraging leaders to regularly conduct career conversations with subordinates where their career goals are discussed and designed how they will be achieved (Leslie, 2015). When it comes to leaders’ ability to motivate coworkers, there seems to be, according to the results from the interviews, mainly three aspects that affect coworkers’ motivation;
• Large engagement from leaders spread to coworkers and creates motivation. This is confirmed by Damen (2007), which argues that commitment from leaders is contagious and affects subordinates, resulting in better performance.
• Leaders praising coworkers for their work, creates motivation among coworkers. Keskes (2013) confirm that leaders, who pay attention, praises and rewards subordinates on the basis of their performances, can inspire commitment among subordinates.
• Leaders explain to the whole team why a certain decision is made and should be implemented, which creates motivation among coworkers. Benedict (2007) argues employees commit in what they believe in. Therefore, it is leader’s responsibility to explain to and convince employees why a certain decision is made and why a change is needed.
Some leaders praise their coworkers, some have a large engagement, but no leader seems to cover all these aspects perfectly. Hence, there seems to be improvement potential on these aspects within Trygg-‐Hansa.
6.1.3 Leading the organization This sub-‐chapter discusses the results of the following considerations: Organize and manage projects, Coming up with new ideas, Decision making on improvement/changes and Strategic understanding.
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The general perception from the interviewees concerning leaders’ ability to organize and manage projects is that the coworkers mainly manage their own projects since they are responsible for them, themselves, and leaders manage only larger projects. In addition, some interviewee’s experience that they lack information about why decisions are made in the organization, such as lack explaining the reason why a project shall be implemented. Therefore, it is perceived that coworkers are not fully motivated to contribute to the implementation of the project that has been decided from above. According to Benedict (2007), coworkers commit in what they believe in. Therefore, it is the leader’s responsibility to explain to and convince employees why a decision is made. Employees’ acceptance and participation are decisive for successful implementations. Failing to engage employees can result in an unsuccessful implementation that can affect both the organization and relationships within the organization, but also the company's customers and reputation (Benedict, 2007). Regarding leaders’ ability to come up with new ideas, some interviewees think this currently works fine as it is: their leader trying to think in new ways and also trying to streamline, leaders comes up with ideas, both good and bad, and trying to reach the root of the problem as well. However, some interviewees argue that the best way for leaders to improve for the team is when leaders listen to coworkers’ ideas. It is perceived that leaders need fundamental experiences and knowledge about their team’s tasks and roles in order to come up with new relevant ideas, recommendations and improvements for coworkers and the team as a whole, otherwise the best way to improve is when ideas come from team members. This becomes clear when comparing the results from the interviews. Some interviewees argue that their leaders’ manage to come up with advices because the leader was a team member before became promoted while others argue that they cannot get advise because their leaders have too limited insight into coworkers’ tasks. However, this aspect is not considered to be a problem at Trygg-‐Hansa. When it comes to decision-‐making on improvements & changes, implementation and follow up, leaders seem in general give low priority to follow up implemented decisions to ensure they remain. This indicates that leaders may lack being consistent after the decision is made. This may be due to the constant progression of new activities that are internally advertised and spoken about. For example, training in coaching is carried out for leaders and then most of the information is forgotten as the company embarks on the next activity. Green (2004) and Rousseau & Tijoriwala (1999) argues that leaders lack being visible and engaged consistently throughout the change, sometimes due to they believe employees will take responsibility of the change themselves other times they think the change management team (which is most responsible for the entire change in the company) take responsibility for conducting the change. Furthermore, it is essential that leaders understand that their role is decisive in order to influence and drive the change within their own team and make sure it remains. Organizational changes often comprise changing employees’ behavior. It is far more complex to change peoples’ behavior since people tend to relapse into earlier habits if the organization does not work actively to reinforce the change (Bouton, 2014; Prosci, 2012).
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Some leaders lack the strategic understanding, this means that they lack the ability or have difficulties in interpret what the company’s overall strategy means for their own team. This is not a unique problem for Trygg-‐Hansa. Creasey & Hiatt (2012) and (Leslie, 2015) argues that this is considered as leadership deficiencies for both organizations in general and for companies facing organizational changes. This leadership deficiency can be enhanced if top management being clear in communicating both strategy and factors that influence the strategy to leaders within the organization that having a problem with this.
Summary of the analysis of semi-‐structured interview results
The following summary explains how the identified leadership deficiencies from the semi-‐structured interviews are linked to the leadership areas in the literature review. That literature provided the foundation of the questionnaire. Column (2) in the table below presents all questions from the semi-‐structured interviews. All questions with gray colored background were the ones that indicated deficiencies during the interviews. Column (3) shows the corresponding literature to the leadership deficiencies that was indicated from the interview results. Column (4) presents how the content of the questionnaire was divided. Column (1) illustrates how all questions in the semi-‐structured interviews, the content in the literature review and the content in the questionnaire were divided into each leadership dimension. The text under the table explains how each identified deficiency from the semi-‐structured interviews is related to the questionnaire.
Table 12 Research’s content structure
Research's Content Structure (1) Leadership dimensions
(2) Semi-‐structured Interviews (3) Content in the Literature Review
(4) Content in the Questionnaire # Questions
Leading oneself
1 Prioritize 2 Time Management
3 Knowledge of their role 4 Knowledge of the company 5 Fast learner 6 Result oriented 7 Ambition
Motivate Leaders 8 Drive
9 Productive 10 Availability 11 Weigh responsibility 12 Handling of pressure 13 Handling of setbacks 14 Optimistic 15 Reliable
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16 Self-‐awareness 17 Utilizes strengths 18 Compensating weaknesses 19 Self-‐development 20 Seeking feedback Self-‐Awareness
(Leslie, 2015) 21 Receptivity to feedback Self-‐Awareness
Leading others
22 Searching information Communication (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012) Communication
23 Communicates important information 24 Negotiation
25 Confrontation
26 Conflict resolution Leading Employees (Leslie, 2015)
27 Build relationships with subordinates/peers/superiors
Initiating Structure & Consideration
28 The recruitment of suitable people to the team Coaching (Creasey &
Hiatt, 2012) 29 Delegate
30 Listen to other peoples' ideas Employee Development (Leslie, 2015)
31 Organize and manage people Lead Employees (incl. Inspiring commitment, Coaching and Employee
development) 32 Clarify employees role Inspiring
Commitment (Leslie, 2015)
33 Advisory to / mentor / develop subordinates 34 Motivate
Leading the organization
35 Organize and manage projects
36 Coming up with new ideas
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Deciding on improvements/changes, Implementations and Follows up
Change Management (Leslie, 2015) (Creasey &
Hiatt, 2012) Manage Change
38 Interpret company's strategic direction for the own team
Strategic Planning (Leslie, 2015) (Creasey &
Hiatt, 2012) Strategic Planning
Within the leadership dimension: Leading oneself (in the table above), it seems, from the interviews, that leaders at Trygg-‐Hansa have deficiencies within ambition, drive and seeking feedback. Leaders with deficiencies in ambition and drive correspond to literature regarding how to motivate leaders. It is difficult for coworkers to assess leaders real motivation; they can just form their own perception about it. The perception may be correctly perceived but it may also be incorrect perceived. Therefore, this leadership deficiency (illustrated in the table above in the column to the far right) is not further assessed in the questionnaire. Leaders with deficiencies in seeking feedback on their own performances correspond to literature regarding how leaders can improve their own performances by conducting self-‐assessments. The gathering name on this literature is self-‐awareness. Within the leadership dimension: Leading others (in the table above), leaders have defects within searching information from employees regarding their jobs, communicate important information to employees, organize & manage people, clarify employee’s role, mentor/develop and motivate employees. Searching information from employees and communicate important
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information to the employees concerns literature about communication. Organize and manage people is associated with literature about leading employees and initiating structure and consideration. Clarify employee’s role is linked to initiating structure. Mentoring/ develop employees are related to literature about coaching and employee development. Motivate employees is associated with literature that concerns inspiring commitment. All literature without communication within this leadership dimension is so closely related to each other that it all is classified under the same headline in the questionnaire (illustrated in the far right column in the table above). The leadership dimension: Leading the organization (in the table above), has deficiencies within deciding on improvements/changes, implementations and follow up which relates to theory about change management. Finally, leaders had deficiencies in understanding the company's strategic direction for the own team, which correspond to theory about strategic planning. This contributed to that the questionnaire focuses on exploring the leadership deficiencies within self-‐awareness, communication, lead employees, manage change and strategic planning further.
6.2 Analysis and discussion of the questionnaires This chapter presents an analysis and discussion of the results from the questionnaires. This chapter aims to provide a better understanding of the leadership deficiencies, which is related to the first sub-‐research question. Furthermore, input from both leaders and the literature are taken into account and used for the discussion regarding what the organization can do in order to rectify the identified leadership deficiencies. This provides a foundation to the answer of the second sub-‐research question. This chapter emphasizes discussing the leadership weaknesses by taking in leaders’ thoughts and comments on the results of the questionnaires. This was obtained from seven interviews with leaders that participated with their teams in the questionnaires. The considerations are not commented in cases where there is lack of insights or literature. The analysis is linked to relevant theory in order to anchoring insights in the literature. Literature used to confirm various insights may come from all different parts of the literature review since the analysis aims to find the root of the problem. For example, to confirm insights of the results in the Leading others section, literature belonging to personnel resources chapter may be used. This is because the cause of the problem, for example, lead employees may depend on the leader's knowledge, personal goals or motivation, which belongs to the Leading the organization chapter in the literature review. Furthermore, this chapter follows the same structure as the major part of this report: Leading oneself, Leading others and Leading the organization. However, first an introduction to the analysis of the questionnaires is presented below. The table below represents a logical explanation of how the strengths and weaknesses have been defined.
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Table 13 Classification of leadership strengths and weaknesses
Classification Degree Interval Weakness Essential 5,87-‐6,42
I Clear 6,43-‐6,97
I Vague 6,98-‐7,52
Neutral
7,53
I Vague 7,54-‐7,95
I Clear 7,96-‐8,36
Strength Essential 8,37-‐8,77
The average mean value of the whole questionnaire was 7,53 and is thus classified as neutral and separates the strengths from the weaknesses and vice versa. All mean values above the average mean value of the whole questionnaire (7,53) is seen as strengths and all mean values below are seen as weaknesses. The mean values to those aspects that are classified as strengths have been given green color and the mean values to those aspects that are classified as weaknesses have been given an orange color. The weaker the weakness is the darker orange is the color. The stronger the strength is the darker is the green color. The interval between the highest mean value (8,77) and the average mean value for the whole questionnaire (7,53) has been divided in three equal intervals that separate the contrast in the green color. The interval between the average mean value and the lowest mean value (5,87) have also been divided into three equal intervals that separate the contrast in the orange color. The category: classification, to the left in the table consists, weakness (orange color), neutral (gray color), strength (green color). The category in the middle: degree consists vague, clear and essential, this in order to separate stronger and weaker strengths and weaknesses from each other. Degrees were introduced to facilitate the discussion of the results. The category to the right in the table consists mean values, all from the lowest (5,87) to the highest (8,77) of the whole questionnaire. The interval between 5,87-‐6,42 is classified as an essential weakness. The interval between 6,43-‐6,97 is classified as clear weakness. The interval between 6,98-‐7,52 is classified as vague weakness. The interval between 7,54-‐7,95 is classified as vague strength. The interval between 7,96-‐8,36 is classified as clear strength. The interval between 8,37-‐8,77 is classified as an essential strength.
6.2.1 Leading oneself
This sub-‐chapter consists self-‐awareness and communication. The next table presents an analysis of self-‐awareness.
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Table 14 Analysis of the leadership characteristic: Self-‐Awareness
Self-‐Awareness
# To consider/Consideration Responses
Decline to
Answer Mean Min Max SD
1 My manager is actively looking for constructive feedback on own performance from me 65 5 5,98 3,7 8,6 1,4
2 My manager listens to my constructive criticism and improve oneself 47 23 7,17 5,5 9,2 0,9
1-‐2 Average of Self-‐Awareness 56 14 6,58 4,6 8,9 1,1 1-‐42 Average of the whole Questionnaire 65,2 4,8 7,53 6,0 9,0 0,5
The first consideration, My manager is actively looking for constructive feedback on own performance from me, had the mean value 5,98 and is classified as an essential weakness. The min value was 3,7, max value 8,6 and SD 1,4, which means that there was a wide spread of the results between different leaders who participated in the questionnaire. For a few leaders, this aspect is considered as an essential strength (like for instance the max value on 8,6), while most of the leaders are struggling with this aspect, which also the mean value indicates. This is an important aspect, but it is difficult to handle. Many leaders are already actively seeking feedback on their own performance from their employees; still their coworkers experiencing that this is a shortcoming of their leader. This may be because employees are afraid to express what they really feel and think about their leaders, if they fear that it may affect the grading of them. Leaders grade employees once a year, which lays the foundation for their bonuses. If employees are afraid to get poorer grades and thus bonus due to pronounced constructive criticism, they may choose to be silent instead. However, leaders point out that this would never affect the grading of employees. Leslie (2015) argues that organization’s can facilitate leaders' self-‐awareness by introducing assessments of leaders. Leaders should be assessed by subordinates, peers, bosses and even in some cases external partners such as suppliers and customers if it is relevant. This can be done anonymously to increase both the response rate and the honesty of the answers of the respondents. The advantage of collecting opinions from such a broad perspective is that it creates a good general picture of the person's leadership qualities. The second consideration, My manager listens to my constructive criticism and improve oneself, had a mean value of 7,17 corresponding to a vague weakness. Noteworthy regarding this aspect is that there were 14 respondents who did not consider this aspect, which is about three times as much as the average of the whole questionnaire. This consideration is seen as a sensitive subject. It is rarely employees provide feedback to leaders and especially not if the leader do not ask for it. Due to the fact that leaders seldom get feedback it is difficult for employees to have an opinion about whether the leader listens to the feedback or not. This may be one reason why there were few answers to this consideration, compared to other considerations. The average mean value of self-‐awareness is 6,58 and is classified as a clear weakness.
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6.2.2 Leading others This sub-‐chapter consists communication and lead employees. The next table presents an analysis of communication.
Table 15 Analysis of the leadership characteristic: Communication
Communication
# To consider/Consideration Responses
Decline to
Answer Mean Min Max SD
3 My manager explains why there is a need for change within the organization 64 6 7,42 6,6 8,8 0,2
4 My manager explains why there is a need for change within my team 65 5 7,72 6,7 9,3 0,3
5 My manager explains which (e.g. Departments, teams, work processes) within the organization that is affected by the change 64 6 7,13 4,8 9,3 0,6
6 My manager explains which (e.g. Roles, responsibilities, work processes) within my team that is affected by the change 64 6 7,12 5,0 8,3 0,4
7 My manager explains how the changes will be implemented within the organization 66 4 6,92 5,5 7,8 0,2
8 My manager explains how the changes will be implemented in my team 67 3 7,24 6,0 8,2 0,3
9 My manager is constantly seeking information about my work 68 2 6,89 4,7 9,0 0,7
10 My manager communicates important decisions, initiatives and changes in good time for me 65 5 7,64 6,2 8,6 0,3
11 My manager answers my questions about change in a good way so that I understand 64 6 7,96 7,0 9,0 0,2
12 My manager handles my and my colleagues' resistance to change by explaining convincingly why the change is necessary 64 6 7,51 6,9 9,0 0,3
13 My manager informs on how far the company has reached with the change process 66 4 6,88 4,8 8,5 0,4
3-‐13 Average of Communication 65,2 4,8 7,31 5,8 8,7 0,4 1-‐42 Average of the whole Questionnaire 65,2 4,8 7,53 6,0 9,0 0,5
The third consideration, My manager explains why there is a need for change within the organization, had the mean value 7,42 and is classified as a vague weakness. SD was 0,2, indicating the spread of the questionnaire results on the various leaders was quite similar on this consideration. This is considered to be an important aspect. It is important for both employees and managers at all levels to understand the meaning of the change both for themselves and for the entire organization. The company has shortcomings when it comes to communicating why something changes within the company. Gilley (2005) argues communication is a crucial aspect during organizational changes as employee acceptance and participation in change, depends on their personal opinion about the benefits that the change brings (Gilley, 2005). Employees weigh in-‐arguments against counterarguments of change in
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order to form an opinion about the personal advantages and disadvantages that the change brings (Knowles & Linn, 2004). Employees commit in what they believe in. Therefore, it is the leader’s responsibility to explain and convince employees why a change is needed or why a decision is made. Employee acceptance and participation are decisive for successful implementations. Failing to engage employees can result in an unsuccessful implementation that can affect the organization and relationships within the organization, but also the company's customers and reputation (Benedict, 2007). The forth consideration, My manager explains why there is a need for change within my team, had the mean value 7,72 and is classified as a vague strength. The following four considerations are discussed together. The fifth consideration, My manager explains which (e.g. Departments, teams, work processes) within the organization that is affected by the change, had the mean value 7,13 and is classified as a vague weakness. The sixth consideration, My manager explains which (e.g. Roles, responsibilities, work processes) within my team that is affected by the change, had the mean value 7,12 and is classified as a vague weakness. The seventh consideration, My manager explains how the changes will be implemented within the organization, had the mean value 6,92 and is considered to be a clear weakness. The eighth consideration, My manager explains how the changes will be implemented in my team, had a mean value of 7,24 and is seen as a vague weakness. The very most considerations that concern leaders communicating information regarding changes to coworkers perceive as weaknesses in some extent. One reason may be that managers are eaten up by the daily operational work, which means that little time is allocated for communication. Communication must take time at the expense of something else. Moreover, leaders are drowning in all kinds of information via email, which complicates the selection of what is to be communicated. There are also no clear templates or guidelines for how (channels) information shall be communicated to employees. Therefore, it is a challenge for leaders to introduce communication as a routine in the daily work. Hiatt & Creasey (2003) emphasize the importance of leaders, set-‐aside time for communication with coworkers. It may facilitate for leaders if they are trained in how to think when communicating to employees. In addition, the organization may try to tone down coworkers’ expectations of answers regarding changes because it is many changes that both are not defined and also will be difficult to define. The ninth consideration, My manager is constantly seeking information about my work, had a mean value of 6,89 and is seen as a clear weakness. This is very important, it concerns leaders making coworkers feel recognized and it is every leader’s responsibility to ensure. One reason for this deficiency may be that the leaders do not want to spread a sense that they are trying to micromanage the employee, which would hamper them from performing. Williams (1995) argues that managers ought to encourage employees to self-‐direction and problem solving rather than control their work and provide solutions for them as it creates increased commitment, increased quality and productivity when they search for solutions themselves (Williams, 1995). It becomes more difficult for leaders give constructive criticism and praise the employees, the less knowledge they have about the employee's work. Praise is also one important aspect that creates commitment (Keskes, 2013). Therefore, it may be difficult for managers to find the perfect level.
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The tenth consideration, My manager communicates important decisions, initiatives and changes in good time for me, had the mean value 7,64. This is classified as a vague strength. This aspect is related to the discussion of the four considerations above the previous one. The eleventh consideration, My manager answers my questions about change in a good way so that I understand, had the mean value 7,96 and is seen as a clear strength. Min value was 7,0, max value was 9,0 and SD was 0,2. This indicates that all leaders’ results were close to each other in this aspect. Even if leaders defect on a regular basis in communicating information to coworkers, it seems that they take their time to answer coworkers’ questions when they ask. The twelfth consideration, My manager handles my and my colleagues' resistance to change by explaining convincingly why the change is necessary, had a mean value of 7,51 which is seen as a vague weakness. In most cases, employees resist change when they are not informed about why the change is implemented. Again, employees commit in what they believe in. Therefore, it is leader’s responsibility to explain and convince employees why a change is needed or why a decision is made. Employee acceptance and participation are decisive for successful implementations. Failing to engage employees can result in an unsuccessful implementation that can affect the organization and relationships within the organization, but also the company's customers and reputation (Benedict, 2007). The thirteenth consideration, My manager informs on how far the company has reached with the change process, had the mean value 6,88 and is considered to be a clear weakness. This consideration is also linked to the discussion of the four considerations above. The average mean value of communication is 7,31 and is classified as a vague weakness. Leaders think this is the most important skill to improve since it is involved in all the other categories and thus provide a foundation for them in order to function successfully.
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The next table presents an analysis of lead employees.
Table 16 Analysis of the leadership characteristic: Lead Employees
Lead Employees
# To consider/Consideration Responses
Decline to
Answer Mean Min Max SD
14 My manager is clear about the responsibilities that my job comprise 70 0 7,16 6,6 8,7 0,4
15 My manager sets reasonable demands on me 69 1 7,72 7,1 8,5 0,1 16 My manager believes in me 65 5 8,50 7,4 9,7 0,2 17 My manager listens to me 68 2 8,44 7,2 9,5 0,2 18 My manager shows interest in my work 69 1 7,61 5,7 9,0 0,5 19 My manager treats me with respect 70 0 8,77 7,6 9,8 0,2
20 My manager has empathy and care about my well-‐being 69 1 8,51 7,4 9,3 0,2
21 My manager discusses my career goals with me 66 4 6,83 4,0 8,9 0,9
22 My manager helps me to develop a plan for how to achieve my career goals 64 6 6,23 3,6 8,8 1,2
23 My manager gives me challenging assignments and the opportunity to grow 66 4 7,54 6,0 9,1 0,5
24 My manager gives me constructive feedback on what I can improve 68 2 7,03 5,3 8,9 0,4
25 My manager encourages me with praise for my work 68 2 7,40 5,9 8,5 0,4
26 My manager is acting as an advisor to me in my work when I ask for it 64 6 8,23 6,7 9,3 0,3
27 My manager motivates me 70 0 7,07 6,7 8,8 0,4
28 My manager is straight, open and honest with me 68 2 8,19 6,6 9,3 0,4
29 My manager can speak up to me and my colleagues, if necessary 66 4 7,91 6,6 9,1 0,3
30 My manager shows commitment to his / her work 69 1 8,41 5,8 9,5 0,6
31 32
My manager welcomes an open and constructive dialogue regarding his / her decision 70 0 7,68 5,4 9,0 0,4
My manager has the skills required to lead the team effectively 68 2 7,64 6,5 9,1 0,4
14-‐32 Average of Lead Employees 67,7 2,3 7,73 6,2 9,1 0,4 1-‐42 Average of the whole Questionnaire 65,2 4,8 7,53 6,0 9,0 0,5
The fourteenth consideration, My manager is clear about the responsibilities that my job comprise, have a mean value of 7,16, which is classified as vague weakness. Even if the leaders want and try to be clear, they feel that it is difficult because many roles are constantly changing. This is an important consideration since it clarifies coworkers responsibilities which contributes to they know what to focus on. This is confirmed by June (2011), Srikanth & Jomon (2013) and Dubinsky et al (1988), who argues that it is important for leaders to initiate structure, since
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employees feel less ambiguity in their role and what is expected from them, which contributes to increased commitment to the organization, increased job satisfaction and increased job performance. The organization defects on this aspect since responsibilities are not clearly divided from top to bottom within the corporate hierarchy. Leaders closest coworkers perceive their responsibilities as ambiguous from their leaders, which make it difficult for the leader in question to be clear to their employees. The following six considerations are discussed together. The fifteenth consideration, My manager sets reasonable demands on me, had a mean value of 7,72 and is considered to be vague strength. The SD had a value of 0,1, meaning that all leaders had similar results on this consideration. The sixteenth consideration, My manager believes in me, had a mean value of 8,50, and is seen as an essential strength. This aspect had SD of 0,2, indicating all the leaders had similar results and no laggard. The seventeenth consideration, My manager listens to me, had the mean value 8,44 and is considered to be an essential strength. The SD was 0,2, meaning that various results on different leaders was similar. The eighteenth consideration, My manager shows interest in my work, had the mean 7,61, which is classified as vague strength in general. The nineteenth consideration, My manager treats me with respect, had the mean value 8,77. This is the highest mean value of the whole questionnaire. In addition, the SD was 0,2 and the min value 7,6, which means that all leaders that participated with their teams in the questionnaire had this consideration as strength, due to all nine were above 7,53 which is neutral. The twentieth consideration, My manager has empathy and care about my well-‐being, had the mean value of 8,51 and is thus considered to be an essential strength. In addition, the SD was 0,2 and the min value 7,4, which mean that this consideration seems to be strength for most of the leaders that participated. All those considerations above are related to relationship-‐oriented leadership (Tabernero et al., 2009; Gary et al., 2002). As leaders communicate a high degree of relationship-‐oriented leadership, such as leaders listens to employees and show them support, it contributes to higher job satisfaction and better performances (Bhuiyan, 2010). The twenty-‐first consideration, My manager discusses my career goals with me, had a mean value of 6,83 and is considered to be a clear weakness in general, but the SD is 0,9, the max was 8,9 and the min value was 4,0, which means there was a wide spread in the results and some leaders have critical low ratings on this consideration. One leader explained that in the old days, all employees had access to a career coach within the company that employees could approach when needed, which they thought was useful. A crucial aspect in this context is, where the employee is in life. It is more common that young people have a natural drive to get somewhere while some older people might be happy where they are and if they are really old, they might just wait to retire. A few leaders think that it is up to the employee to show that they have ambitions and want to achieve something, and that the leader in such cases should support the employee. In addition, it places a responsibility on the employee because there is a large lack of knowledge about how managers should handle this. Baldwin (2000) argues, organizations can help leaders with this by encouraging leaders to regularly conduct career conversations with subordinates where their career goals are discussed and designed how they will be achieved. This motivates employees to high-‐performance in order to increase the chance to be promoted.
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The twenty-‐second consideration, My manager helps me to develop a plan for how to achieve my career goals, had mean value of 6,23. This is classified as a critical weakness in general. SD is 1,2, min value is 3,6 and max value 8,8. This indicates that it differs widely from leader to leader on this consideration. Some few leaders manage this aspect well while it is a critical weakness for most of the leaders. However, this consideration is connected to the previous one. If a leader defects on discussing career goals with employees they probably defects even more when it comes to help coworkers to develop a plan for how to achieve their goals. This explains why this consideration has lower mean value than the previous one. The twenty-‐third consideration, My manager gives me challenging assignments and the opportunity to grow, had the mean value 7,54 and is classified as a vague strength. Employees are currently overburdened with duties and therefore there are limited opportunities for employees to take on new and more challenging tasks alongside, which explains why this does not have a higher mean value. The twenty-‐fourth consideration, My manager gives me constructive feedback on what I can improve, had a mean value of 7,03 and is classified as a vague weakness. In order for leaders to give constructive criticism to coworkers, leaders want an invitation to that discussion. It is important that employees are clear in communicating the extent of constructive criticism they demand to their leader, describes one leader. In order for a leader to be able to give constructive criticism, it presupposes that the leader have sufficient insight into employees' work, which they do not always have, especially in cases where the leader relies largely on employees to manage their work completely themselves. It is not uncommon within organizations that leaders lack giving their employees constructive feedback (Creasey & Hiatt, 2012). In addition, the organization can help leaders by creating a discussion group or a forum where leaders can discuss these kinds of issues with each other, to support each other and to learn from each other (Schwartz, 2011). The twenty-‐fifth consideration, My manager encourages me with praise for my work had the mean value 7,40, which considered to be a vague weakness. The problem is that leaders need to know what coworkers have done in their work in order to understand if they have done it well and deserves praise for it, but occasionally leaders lack that insight because employees are often self-‐propelled. Creasey & Hiatt (2012) argues that it is not uncommon within organizations that leaders lack giving their employees positive feedback. The twenty-‐sixth consideration, My manager is acting as an advisor to me in my work when I ask for it, had the mean value 8,23, which is classified as a clear strength. Again, employees seem to be supported when they really need it. Supporting employees in their work are related to relationship-‐oriented leadership, which contributes to employees perceive job satisfaction in a higher degree than not supported employees (Bhuiyan, 2010). The twenty-‐seventh consideration, My manager motivates me, had the mean value 7,07 and is considered to be a vague weakness. Many considerations within the category: lead employees are related to motivate employees in some extent, like for instance, positive feedback, my manager believes in me, the leader show interest in employees work, career planning etc. The
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mean value of 7,07 on this consideration may reflect the average mean value of all considerations that are related to motivation. However, this mean value is not calculated since it is difficult to define exactly which considerations that are related to motivation and which are not. The twenty-‐eighth consideration, My manager is straight, open and honest with me, had the mean value 8,19 and is classified as a clear strength. This is essential in order to create a commitment from employees. This is confirmed by Folger & Skarlicki (1999), who is arguing that dishonest, unfair, misleading and deceptive information from leader to subordinate regarding change can create a vindictive feeling among employees. Furthermore, they claim that employees that are treated with truthful and fair information creates enthusiasm and commitment to change among employees, even if it entails negative aspects and unwanted results for the employee in question (Cobb et al., 1995). Therefore, it is important that the information provided to coworkers is true even if the change results in a negative impact on employees. However, this consideration seems to be managed well at Trygg-‐Hansa. The twenty-‐ninth consideration, My manager can speak up to me and my colleagues, if necessary, had mean value of 7,91 and is classified as a vague strength. Trygg-‐Hansa is a company where employees take on a lot of responsibility and it is rarely needed a reprimand from a superior due to employees have misbehaved. Hence, it is not considered to be a problem or deficiency. The thirtieth consideration, My manager shows commitment to his / her work, had a mean value of 8,41 and is classified as an essential strength. It is helpful that leader's commitment is considered to be a strength since commitment is contagious and affects subordinates positively, resulting in better performances (Damen, 2007). The thirty-‐first consideration, My manager welcomes an open and constructive dialogue regarding his / her decision, had a mean value of 7,68 and is considered to be a vague strength. As leaders communicate high degree of consideration, such as leaders listens to employees and letting them participate in decision-‐making, it contributes to a higher degree of job satisfaction and better performances among employees (Bhuiyan, 2010). The thirty-‐second consideration, My manager has the skills required to lead the team effectively, had a mean value of 7,64 and is classified as a vague strength. All considerations within this category are related to lead employees, thus the mean value of this category (7,73) are quite close to the mean value of this consideration. The average of lead employees had the mean value 7,73, which is equivalent to a vague strength.
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6.2.3 Leading the organization This sub-‐chapter consists manage change and strategic planning. The following table presents the analysis of manages change.
Table 17 Analysis of the leadership characteristic: Manage Change
Manage Change
# To consider/Consideration Responses
Decline to
Answer Mean Min Max SD 33 My manager is positive towards change 61 9 8,74 8,0 9,4 0,1
34 My manager involves me so that I may participate and influence the change’s meaning within the team I belong 64 6 7,60 6,0 9,3 0,4
35 My manager shows understanding and supportive during changes 62 8 7,81 6,8 9,3 0,3
36 My manager is committed to change 65 5 8,39 7,0 9,2 0,2 37 My manager is active throughout the change 57 13 7,77 5,8 9,5 0,5
38 My manager drives the changes within the team I belong 61 9 7,47 5,3 9,1 0,7
39 My manager completes the changes and ensure that they remain 55 15 7,46 5,7 9,0 0,5
40 My manager ensures that we celebrate successful change within our team 62 8 5,87 3,4 8,6 1,2
33-‐40 Average of Manage Change 60,9 9,1 7,64 6,0 9,2 0,5 1-‐42 Average of the whole Questionnaire 65,2 4,8 7,53 6,0 9,0 0,5
The thirty-‐third consideration, My manager is positive towards change, had the mean value 8,74 which is seen as an essential weakness. The min value was 8,0, the max was 9,4 and SD was 0,1, which means that this consideration is seen as a strength for all leaders that participated in the questionnaire. The introduction to this report makes clear that change is something that is crucial in today's situation, for insurance companies to be competitive. A positive approach to change is a prerequisite for making changes successful within companies. This is confirmed by Fredrickson (2003) and Lyubomirsky (2005) who argue that human emotions are contagious and positive emotions are correlated with favorable outcomes. However, leaders being positive toward changes are not a drawback within Trygg-‐Hansa. The thirty-‐fourth consideration, My manager involves me so that I may participate and influence the change’s meaning within the team I belong, had the mean value 7,60 and is classified as a vague strength. The thirty-‐fifth consideration, My manager shows understanding and supportive during changes, had the mean value 7,81 and is seen as a vague strength. These two considerations above are both related to the relationship-‐oriented leadership. Leaders that support & listens to employees and letting them participate in decision-‐making, results in higher job satisfaction and good performances among employees (Bhuiyan, 2010).
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The thirty-‐sixth consideration, My manager is committed to change, had a mean value of 8,39 which is seen as an essential strength. The SD of this aspect was 0,2, the min value was 7,0 and the max 9,2, which means that this aspect was not neither an essential nor clear weakness for non of the leaders that were involved in the questionnaire. It is helpful that leader's commitment is considered to be a strength since commitment is contagious and affects subordinates positively, which contributes to good performances among coworkers (Damen, 2007). The thirty-‐seventh consideration, My manager is active throughout the change, had mean value 7,77, which correspond to a vague strength. The last three considerations within this category are discussed together. The thirty-‐eighth consideration, My manager drives the changes within the team I belong, had a mean value of 7,47, which is considered to be a vague weakness. The thirty-‐ninth consideration, My manager completes the changes and ensure that they remain, had the mean value 7,46. This is classified as a vague weakness. The fortieth consideration, My manager ensures that we celebrate successful change within our team, had the a mean value of 5,87. This corresponds to an essential weakness. In addition, for the last mentioned consideration the min value was 3,4, the max value was 8,6 and the SD was 1,2. This suggests that this aspect varies widely from leader to leader, for some this is a strength, but for the majority it is considered to be a weakness. These three considerations are all related to make sure that changes persists. All these considerations are perceive as weaknesses. One possible reason is that Trygg-‐Hansa tends to rush through new initiatives and begin and drive many changes simultaneously, which may result in leaders do not make sure that changes persist. Another possible reason is that Trygg-‐Hansa is a self-‐driven organization, which means that no one other than oneself, make sure that the task is completed. This implies that if coworkers forget to carry out the new routine, no one will notice, since every one control themselves. This may be a possible cause of changes are difficult to maintain. The leaders of Trygg-‐Hansa are trained in the ADKAR model which they perceive was worthwhile, but this, like all other initiatives, are stopped being promoted within the organization when the next initiative begins. This result in leaders forgets to use it in their daily work, as they fall back on old routines. Therefore, it had facilitated if the organization helps leaders reminding them to work actively with the ADKAR model to the greatest extent possible.
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The table below presents the analysis of strategic planning.
Table 18 Analysis of the leadership characteristic: Strategic Planning
Strategic Planning
# To consider/Consideration Responses
Decline to
Answer Mean Min Max SD
41 My manager has the ability to interpret the company's overall strategy for the team I belong 65 5 7,68 6,6 8,7 0,2
42 My manager involves me to discuss what must be done for us to contribute to the company's strategic objectives 70 0 7,10 4,8 9,3 0,8
41-‐42 Average of Strategic Planning 67,5 2,5 7,39 5,7 9,0 0,5 1-‐42 Average of the whole Questionnaire 65,2 4,8 7,53 6,0 9,0 0,5
Strategic planning consists two considerations and the first one, number forty-‐one; My manager has the ability to interpret the company's overall strategy for the team I belong, had a mean value of 7,68 and is thus classified as vague strength. Worth noting is that the standard deviation is relatively low (0,2), indicating that there was low differences in the distribution of responses to this consideration. This means that most leaders deal with this consideration quite well. It has been developed a strategy that is relatively new, which means that there is some ambiguity that remains. However, it is important to continue to talk about the strategy within the company so that leaders do not forget the basics and get stuck in the details. Furthermore, it is important to have patience with the strategy, everything can not change overnight. Even if this consideration seems to be a strength, some leader still argues that there is improvement potential in how this is handled within the company. The executive management team develops strategies that are elaborate and good, but the company fails to translate these strategies down within the corporate hierarchy. It adds responsibility on leaders closest coworkers to interpret what the strategy means for their teams, which can lead to various leaders at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy, interprets the strategy differently. This contributes to the company pulling in different directions. In addition, it is perceived that teams are prioritized differently from above and thus have different support from the top in the organization. Slack et al (2010) argues that subordinates’ commitment can be further strengthened if leaders clarify organizations’ vision and explain how it is linked to their role in the company (Slack et al., 2010) (Martin & Schmidt, 2010). This comprises to explain to subordinates’ how their work helps to fulfill organizations’ vision. The forty-‐second consideration, My manager involves me to discuss what must be done for us to contribute to the company's strategic objectives, is classified as vague weakness due to the mean value was 7,10. The standard deviation was 0,8, max value on 9,3 and a min value of 4,8, meaning that some leaders manage this aspect well while others have more difficulties to handle it. Bhuiyan (2010) argues that when leaders listens to employees and letting them participate in decision-‐making, it contributes to a higher degree of job satisfaction and better performances among employees (Bhuiyan, 2010). In addition, Anderson et al (2010) argues that organizations
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may help leaders by urging them to involve subordinates in decision making since it creates commitment (Anderson & Anderson, 2010). The average mean value of strategic planning is 7,39 and is classified as a vague weakness of leaders. Creasey & Hiatt (2012) argues leaders lack this skill in general. De Vries (2010) argues that companies can help leaders if top management being clear in communicating both strategy and factors that influence the strategy to leaders within the organization. Furthermore, it is suitable to involve young talents in developing the strategy as it increases leaders’ strategic thinking. Learning strategic planning can be facilitated by providing mentoring and coaching for the leaders (European Mentoring & Coaching Council, 2012).
General discussion
The investigated subject: leadership is subjective. In this case it means that two respondents that have the same leader can perceive their leaders’ leadership differently and thus grade each consideration different. This is because all people have different backgrounds. Imagine two people having the same leader for the moment. The first person, which previously had a leader who was ideal, assesses their current leader as worse than the other person, which previously had a leader who was miserable. This makes it difficult to understand where the line between strength and weakness should be drawn. In addition, the relevance of the results may differ between different teams. Therefore, it is difficult to interpret the results real meaning. Like for instance, consider how to interpret a mean value of 6,0 on the following consideration: My manager involves me to discuss what must be done for us to contribute to the company's strategic objectives. This result may indicate, for the leader of the ”Digital Business Development” team, that the employees within the team experience a lack of a clear strategic direction of their leader. This makes all decisions in the daily work more difficult for the employees in the team. Hence, the result of 6,0 on that consideration may mean that it is an important leadership weakness to improve for the leader of that team. In contrast, imagine that the leader of the ”Direct Sales – Enterprise” team would have the same result on the same consideration. That may mean that the leader has deficiencies in communicating and interpret the company’s strategic direction for the team, but the question is if it would make any difference if the leader would be good at it instead. Maybe the company’s strategic direction does not affect employees that work with selling insurances to companies significant. Therefore a weakness in that consideration (My manager involves me to discuss what must be done for us to contribute to the company's strategic objectives), is maybe is not as relevant for the leader of the ”Direct Sales – Enterprise” team as for the leader of the ”Digital Business Development” team. In addition, it may also be questioned if all considerations are equal important or not. Like for instance, the following consideration: My manager discusses my career goals with me, had the average mean value of 6,83 of all questionnaires. This suggests that leaders in general are poor at discussing employees’ future and their development potential. It may not be important that leaders are skilled in discussing employees’ career goals, in those cases where their employees are satisfied with where they are, what they do and do not want to take the next step in their
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careers. For those employees, it does not matter if their leader has deficiencies within that consideration. In contrast, the following consideration: My manager is clear about the responsibilities that my job comprises, had 7,16 as the average mean value of all questionnaires. This suggests that leaders are poor in clarifying employees’ roles and responsibilities. If employees feel ambiguity about their responsibilities, they may become unmotivated. Unmotivated employees lead to poor performances of the team. Thus, this consideration may be a more important weakness for the whole organization to improve, since it affects all employees compared to the previous consideration: My manager discusses my career goals with me, even though that mean value was lower. The complexity of evaluating the importance of each consideration entailed this was left to each leader that participated in the questionnaire, to interpret by themselves, since they have most insights and best understanding of what their employees need.
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7 Conclusions, sustainability, implications and future research
This chapter presents mainly the conclusions from the questionnaire since the semi-‐structured interviews mainly provided the foundation in order to conduct the questionnaire. The research questions are being answered. Furthermore, sustainability, implications for both the managerial and the research perspective are presented and finally recommendations for future research.
7.1 Conclusions of the research questions The purpose of this report was to identify what is required for insurers’ leadership in order to better manage organizational changes. Furthermore, this study aims to provide an explanation of what the insurers’ organization can do in order to conditions that facilitate the development of the leadership deficiencies. To fulfill the purpose, the main research question was formulated: How can insurers develop their leadership in order to better manage organizational changes? The main question was broken down into two sub-‐research questions. The main question is answered by answering the two sub-‐questions. Thus the sub-‐research questions are presented first.
7.1.1 Conclusion of the first sub-‐research question
The first sub-‐research question was: What are the leadership deficiencies in insurance companies that prevent them from managing organizational changes effectively? The following bullet points contain conclusions related to the first sub-‐research question:
• No critical leadership deficiency in general The leadership at a category level (self-‐awareness, communication, lead employees, manage change and strategic planning) has high mean values in general. Most people would probably associate a grade below five on a scale of ten in leadership, as poor leadership. Poor leadership would probably get employees to feel discontent with their leaders. However, the lowest mean value for all investigated categories is 6.58 on a scale between zero and ten. This suggests that there are no leadership deficiencies for the majority of the leaders, which are in critical need of improvement.
• Leadership differs significantly in the personal level The average min value of the worst category: self-‐awareness is 4,6, while the average max value for the same category is 8,9. This suggests that one or a few leaders have considerable difficulties with most of the considerations in that category compared to the top in that leadership category. The same applies for the communication category, which is a little bit better, but still differs a lot between the average min
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(5,8) and average max values (8,7). It may cause frustration among the employees if it differs too much between the leaders leadership skills within the same company.
• Communication is the key The category: communication is related to all other categories in one-‐way or another. This means, focusing on improving everything that involves communication (e.g. How, why, what to communicate to whom), means that the other categories will be improved as well.
• Leadership deficiencies within each leadership category The most important leadership deficiencies within each leadership category are presented in the list below: Self-‐awareness
o Seeking for feedback from coworkers on own leadership performances o Listen to constructive criticism
Communication o In general
Lead employees o Clarify employee’s role/responsibilities (part of motivating coworkers) o Career planning (discuss and develop a plan) (part of motivating coworkers) o Provide coworkers with constructive feedback (part of motivating coworkers) o Praise coworkers (part of motivating coworkers)
Manage change o Drive the change o Complete the change o Celebrate the completed changes
Strategic planning o Involve employees in discussions regarding how to contribute to the
company’s strategic objective
7.1.2 Conclusions of the second sub-‐research question
The second sub-‐research question was: How can insurers create conditions for leaders that facilitate the managing of organizational changes? The following bullet point contains suggested recommended initiatives for the company in order to rectify the identified leadership deficiencies, which aims to provide the answer to the second sub-‐research question. Note that this is not just about develop and improving the deficiencies, but also to enhance existing strengths, since both contribute to improving the management of organizational changes.
1. Add a new coach position to support and (9.) mentor leaders The company is conducting both internal and external leadership education for leaders on a regular basis. The downside of the educations is that they are theoretical and general as they are standardized for all types of businesses and it is often required that leaders must interpret how
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to apply the education in their daily work. The leaders rarely have time for this because their operational work takes up all their time. This means that educational programs may not be used to the extent that the company wishes. If an internal coach is introduced instead, this person may be responsible for customizing the leadership training programs so that they fit Trygg-‐Hansa as a company more specifically. The coach can support and mentoring leaders in all leadership questions that leaders need support within, like for instance, how to implement and apply the tools and routines from the educations in leaders’ daily work and make sure they persists.
2. Motivate leaders Due to the fact that human emotions are contagious and positive emotions are correlated to favorable outcomes, it is essential to have motivated leaders. Likewise that positive emotion contributes to favorable outcomes, negative emotions contributes to unfavorable outcomes. This means that unmotivated leaders spread negative emotions to the team members and make them in some extent perform poorly, which not is preferable. Hence, organizations ought identify unmotivated leaders and otherwise help them to identify tasks which would make their work more interesting than current one or help them to find another job within the company that they found is more interesting. This also applies to leaders who already are motivated. Leaders’ motivation can be increased by identifying and focusing on tasks they think is more interesting than current tasks. Of course, the tasks must be within the scope of both the leaders role and the company's strategy. This would result in increased motivation and increased performance of both leaders and belonging employees. However, according to the semi-‐structured interviews, most of the leaders at Trygg-‐Hansa are motivated, but it is essential that the organization supports those leaders that lack motivation. If a coach position is introduced it is appropriate that the coach have responsibility for this.
3. Introduce self-‐assessment on leaders
It turned out, in this research, that the leaders found the questionnaire was useful because they got a result on how employees perceive them as a leader. They have never been given access to anything similar before. The results of the questionnaire meant that they had access to something more than just their own assumptions to start with, when they work with developing themselves as leaders. Thus, insurers ought introduce and carry out self-‐assessments of leaders, for leaders on a regular basis. Each leader ought to be anonymously assessed by their team. Furthermore, each leader needs to get its own results in order to know what to improve. According to the results of the questionnaires, leaders lack seeking and listening on constructive feedback, but that can be enhanced in this way. In addition, if an internal coach is introduced, it is suitable that the coach is responsible for the self-‐assessments on each leader, and make sure it is conducted regularly. Furthermore, the coach may also have the responsibility to help leaders to interpret the results and discuss what can be improved and how.
4. Mentor leaders in communication
The leaders at Trygg-‐Hansa have been trained in communication. Furthermore, the company has a communication tool that facilitates leaders’ communication with coworkers. Anyhow, leaders are drowning in their daily operational tasks and have less time to think about what and how to communicate essential information to coworkers. This was reflected in the results of the
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questionnaires as well, since almost all considerations within communication were classified as deficiencies. Thus, it would be appropriate to have a coach that could guide leaders in how to use the communication tools effectively. Furthermore, during organizational changes it may occur questions among employees that can be difficult for leaders to answer. This may be because the new changes have just begun to be discussed, and no one yet knows the extent of the change. Thus, the organization ought help leaders communicating openness and clarity regarding this ambiguity to coworkers. This could mean that employees get better understanding and acceptance of the ambiguity regarding the change. If a coach position is added it may be appropriate that this responsibility is placed in that position.
5. Educate and mentor leaders in coaching coworkers
Many leaders do not know how to conduct coaching conversations with coworkers regarding praise, constructive feedback and career planning, which also was reflected in the results of the questionnaires. During interviews in this research, it was noticed that coworkers appreciate leaders who manage to conduct career conversations since it contributes to coworkers perceive there is a bright future for them within the company. Furthermore, by conducting career conversations, leaders show coworkers that they believe in the coworker. This creates motivation that encourages better performances among coworkers, which is crucial for successful organizational changes. Thus, insurers ought educate leaders in how to conduct coaching and career conversations with coworkers. It can be done by purchasing external educations in coaching, but if an internal coach is introduced, it is suitable that the coach is responsible for educating the leaders in how to coach coworkers. Furthermore, if a coach position is added, it can make sure that all leaders introduce and sustain routines regarding coaching. In addition, by mentoring leaders in coaching coworkers, leaders can strengthen their skills in coaching even more.
6. Mentoring leaders in sustaining changes
There are lots of changes going on simultaneously within the company in order to keep the company competitive. This contributes to that many initiatives regarding change begins and the focus is rather to begin the changes, than to fulfill them. This may be because many employees believe that the change persists or takes care of itself if someone has started it. The problem is that many changes involve changes in employees’ behaviors. To handle these types of changes, it requires an introduction of new procedures and routines, which then are maintained. Even if the leaders at Trygg-‐Hansa are educated in change management, which is a methodology for conducting change within organizations, they lack the ability to sustain changes. This is reflected in the results of the questionnaires as well. The difficulty lies in the interpretation of how to use the theoretical training in change management in leaders’ daily work. If a coach position would be added, the coach could conduct mentor conversations with the leaders in order to develop their skills in sustaining changes and make sure that the newly introduced routines persists.
7. Educate leaders in strategic planning According to the results of the questionnaires, leaders have deficiencies in involving coworkers in the strategic planning. Leaders can create commitment among employees if they explain and involve the coworkers in their team on how they should contribute to the organization approaching its strategic goals and vision. Thus, organizations ought identify, support and help
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leaders that lack the ability to interpret what the strategic direction means for their team. Leaders’ strategic understanding can be enhanced by mentoring and coaching. If a coach position is introduced, it is suitable that the coach has the responsibility in helping leaders to develop this skill.
8. Introduce leadership meetings and forums to support leaders
The questionnaire indicates that there are leadership deficiencies within the company. For some the deficiencies are more significant and critical than for others. Considering the fact that leaders occasionally are recruited or promoted due to other reasons than their ability as leaders, it is not strange if they have deficiencies in leading people. It may be appropriate to introduce scheduled leadership meetings on a regular basis as well as forums on the intranet for leaders to discuss leadership issues with each other. Hence, leaders can help each other to develop themselves to become better leaders for their teams. All kind of leadership issues can be discussed in those meetings. It probably requires someone who is responsible for these meetings; otherwise there is a risk that it’s going down the drain after a while. If a coach position is introduced, it fits well that the coach is responsible for these meetings. This contributes to a more thoughtful execution of the meetings and that they do not lose its purpose.
7.1.3 Conclusions of the main research question This sub-‐chapter presents the link between the conclusion of the first and the second sub-‐research question. Furthermore, by answering the two sub-‐research questions, this sub-‐chapter aims to provide an answer to the main research question: How can insurance companies develop their leadership in order to better manage organizational changes? According to the first sub-‐research question; in order to develop the leadership within companies so they manage organizational changes more effectively, companies ought first identify the most important leadership deficiencies within the company. According to this research it is considered to be the ones presented in the list with bullet points in the chapter: 7.1.1 Conclusion of the first sub-‐research question. These deficiencies are summarized in the second column from the left in the table below: RQ1 Leadership deficiencies, which are the suggested answer to the first sub-‐research question. According to the second sub-‐research question; when the most important leadership deficiencies are identified, it is suitable that companies implement appropriate initiatives in order to rectify the identified leadership deficiencies. According to this research it suggests that companies introduce the initiatives presented in chapter: 7.1.2 Conclusions of the second sub-‐research question. These initiatives are also summarized in the far right column in the table below: RQ2 Recommended initiatives. The table below shows which leadership dimensions the leadership deficiencies and corresponding recommended initiatives belongs to. The upper deficiency in the second column from the left: Leaders’ internal motivation is a result of the semi-‐structured interviews. Leaders internal motivation is not considered to be a major deficiency at the case company. However, leaders internal motivation is considered to be crucial, since leaders with large internal
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motivation affect coworkers in a positive manner and makes them perform better. Furthermore, leaders internal motivation can always be strengthened. If companies working to improve leaders internal motivation, it contributes to that companies manage organizational changes more effectively. Therefore, the second initiative: motivate leaders, in the table below is considered to be a recommended initiative even if it not fully is seen as a deficiency. The rest of the deficiencies in the second column are the results from the analysis of the questionnaire.
Table 19 Connections between conclusions of RQ1 and RQ2
Leadership dimension
RQ1 Leadership deficiencies (From interviews and questionnaires)
RQ2 Recommended initiatives: (1) Add new Coach position (responsible for all initiatives)
Leading oneself
(2) Motivate leaders
(9) Mentoring leaders (introduce and maintain routines)
Self-‐awareness: Seeking and listen to constructive feedback
(3) Self-‐assessment (e.g. questionnaire)
(8) Leadership meetings & forums
Leading others
Communication: In general
(4) Mentoring leaders in communication
Lead employees: Coaching e.g. Praise, Constructive feedback, Career planning
(5) Educate and mentor leaders in coaching
Leading the organization
Manage change: Drive, Complete and Celebrate changes
(6) Mentoring leaders in sustaining changes
Strategic planning: Involve coworkers in discussions
(7) Educate and mentoring leaders in strategic planning
By identifying the leadership deficiencies that prevent the company from conducting organizational changes effectively the first sub-‐research question is answered. By recommend appropriate initiatives that the company may implement in order to rectify the identified leadership deficiencies and to reinforce important strengths, the second sub-‐research question is answered. Thus, by the identification of the leadership deficiencies and by recommending suitable initiatives to rectify the identified leadership deficiencies and to recommend how important leadership strengths can be enhanced, the main research question is answered.
7.2 Sustainability This chapter presents a sustainability discussion regarding the results and conclusions. The discussion in this part of the chapter is not based on sources, but primarily on logical arguments.
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The social and economic perspectives are included in the discussion. From an environmental perspective, this research is considered not to have any major impact and will therefore not be discussed more closely. Regarding the social and economic perspective, it may be argued that poor leadership causes poor work performances among coworkers. This may contribute, in the worst case, to poor work performances by the whole company which in turn may result in insufficient financial performances. Lack of financial results, entails a reduction in profitability, it may also contribute to the downsizing of personnel if the poor financial results lasts over a longer time frame. This contributes to increased unemployment, which is not good for the individual, the company and the country that the company runs its business within. It should be added that the degree of inadequate leadership is probably extremely high in order to contribute to such a bad financial results for the company that it leads to cuts in personnel, but it should not be excluded because it is a possible scenario. However, good leadership can lead to the opposite. This argues for the relevance of companies to rectify their leadership deficiencies.
7.3 Implications This chapter presents both the managerial and the research implications of this research.
7.3.1 Managerial implications The managerial implications imply the practical use of the results and recommended solutions that is presented in this research. This study has focused on increase the insight regarding how Trygg-‐Hansa may handle the internal development of their leadership in order to better manage organizational changes. All people have different experiences, conditions and characteristics within leadership, this contributes to that leadership tends to be person specific and thus differs widely from person to person. In addition, all companies emphasize the importance of educating their leaders differently. This means that the leadership in some organizations may be perceived as better and more developed than in other organizations. Thus, organizations may have different strengths and weaknesses regarding the leadership. Furthermore, the leadership deficiencies may also be different critical within different organizations. The leaders at Trygg-‐Hansa, are perceived as humble and the company emphasizes to educate leaders within several leadership skills regularly. The educations entail that leaders at Trygg-‐Hansa may have strengths within those leadership skills that they have carried out educations within. This makes the results of this research firm specific and thus it may be argued that it is difficult to urge other companies and organizations to use the results and the recommendation of this research. However, the working procedure in this research: how a company or organization ought investigate, assess and rectify their leadership deficiencies, is applicable to other companies. However, Trygg-‐Hansa’s HR department has used the results of this research in order to enhance the understanding of what leadership areas that need to be developed further. In addition, all leaders that participated with their team in the research got access to their personal results of the questionnaire, which they use as a foundation in order to develop themselves as leaders.
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7.3.2 Research implications The knowledge field of leadership is broad and well researched, but there are niche areas within the leadership subject that is not as well explored. There is research about leadership deficiencies for all kind of organizations, but the research does not examine leadership for organizational change. There is also research regarding leadership deficiencies for companies that face organizational change. However, research regarding the leadership deficiencies that prevent insurance companies from manage organizational change effectively seems to be a gap in the literature. This research contributes to the existing literature with more specific and complementary knowledge about the leadership areas and deficiencies that are most important in order to better manage organizational changes. Furthermore, this research also contributes with insights regarding how insurance companies may create conditions for leaders that facilitate the managing of organizational change. This implies more than just providing recommendations on how to rectify leadership deficiencies, but also about how to strengthen some of the most important aspects such as leaders motivation, even if that is not perceived as a deficiency.
7.4 Future research Even though this research was conducted at one department at Trygg-‐Hansa, nine teams in several departments participated in the research. This means that almost the whole width of the company was covered, both back office related and customer related departments. However, this study and especially the questionnaires in this research have focused mainly on investigating the leadership level nearest the coworkers, but some inputs from leaders belonging higher leadership levels has been obtained during unstructured interviews. This was done in order to enhance the understanding of the results of the questionnaires as well as to provide a foundation for the analysis and discussion chapter of the questionnaires. What would be interesting is to investigate all leadership levels in order to enhance the perception of how the leadership deficiencies differ between different leadership levels. In addition, this research was conducted at Trygg-‐Hansa. Due to the reason that all companies have different knowledge, experiences conditions related to leadership, it means that leadership differs from company to company. It would be interesting as well to conduct a research that examines different companies within the same industry as well as companies within different industries with each other, in order to notice how the leadership deficiencies differs between them. In such a case, it would also be interesting to investigate why the leadership may differ between companies within the same industry and within different industries.
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Appendix
Appendix A: Semi-‐structured interview guideline About you
• Name • Age • Education • Previous professional experience • Current job title • Job tasks and responsibilities
Strengths and weaknesses o Strengths with current leader o Strengths with leaders in general at T-‐H o Weaknesses with current leader o Weaknesses with leaders in general at T-‐H
Leading oneself
1. Prioritize 2. Time Management 3. Knowledge of their role 4. Knowledge of the company 5. Fast learner 6. Result oriented 7. Ambition 8. Drive 9. Productive 10. Availability 11. Weigh responsibility 12. Handling of pressure 13. Handling of setbacks 14. Optimistic 15. Reliable 16. Self-‐awareness 17. Utilizes strengths 18. Compensating weaknesses 19. Self-‐development 20. Seeking feedback 21. Receptivity to feedback
Leading others
22. Searching information 23. Communicates important information 24. Negotiation 25. Confrontation 26. Conflict resolution 27. Build relationships with subordinates/peers/superiors 28. The recruitment of suitable people to the team 29. Delegate 30. Listen to other peoples' ideas 31. Organize and manage people 32. Clarify employee’s role 33. Advisory to / mentor / develop subordinates 34. Motivate
Leading the organization
35. Organize and manage projects 36. Coming up with new ideas
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37. Deciding on improvements/changes, Implementations and Follows up 38. Interpret company's strategic direction for the own team
Appendix B: Introduction to the questionnaire Hi, My name is Jacob Andrén, I am now studying my final year within the masters of Industrial Economy at the Royal Institute of Technology and I do my Master Thesis work at Trygg-‐Hansa. I have Jesper Bengtsson (at Digital Transformation & System ownership) as supervisor. Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the leadership necessary for insurance companies to be able to manage change within the organization effectively. Execution Trygg-‐Hansa's leadership will be assessed by this anonymous questionnaire, which is sent out to employees at Trygg-‐Hansa. The respondents are supposed to provide feedback on their closest leader. A total of 9 leaders have chosen to participate and thus be evaluated in this survey. The survey examines the most important aspects of leadership in order to manage organizational change. The survey takes about 10 minutes to answer. The survey ends April 20 cl.23: 59. The use of survey-‐results The results of the survey will be compiled to create an image that represents the most important leadership deficiencies at Trygg-‐Hansa. The result will possibly lay the foundation for continued leadership training and development at Trygg-‐Hansa since this survey are carried out in collaboration with the HR department. HR will NOT take part of the specific results for each leader, but they will only take part of the average result for the whole survey of all 9 questionnaires. This gives HR indications of the leadership aspects that have the most need of being developed. What's in it for me? All respondents in the survey rate their closest leader. Your leader will take part of the anonymous results from the questionnaire that was carried out in your own team, provided that the number of respondents is equal to 4 or more, otherwise the poll is not seen as anonymous. Your leader can thus find out which aspects he or she needs to improve. All respondents participating in the survey will ha the opportunity to take part of the results of the entire survey. The result will be mailed to all respondents at the end of May. Questions If you have questions about my work or are simply curious to know more, please feel free to contact me by phone, e-‐mail or come by my place; Location: FG32, next Jesper Bengtsson E-‐mail: [email protected] Tel.: ??? ??? ?? ??
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Appendix C: Questionnaire Self-‐Awareness
# To consider/Consideration Weakness
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Strength
10 Do not know
1 My manager is actively looking for constructive feedback on own performance from me
2 My manager listens to my constructive criticism and improve themselves
Communication
# To consider/Consideration Weakness
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Strength
10 Do not know
3 My manager explains why there is a need for change within the organization
4 My manager explains why there is a need for change within my team
5 My manager explains which (e.g. departments, teams, work processes) within the organization affected by the change
6 My manager explains which (e.g. roles, responsibilities, work processes) within my team affected by the change
7 My manager explains how the changes will be implemented within the organization
8 My manager explains how the changes will be implemented in my team
9 My manager is constantly seeking information about my work
10 My manager communicates important decisions, initiatives and changes in good time for me
11 My manager welcomes open and constructive dialogue regarding his / her decision
12 My manager answers my questions about change in a good way so that I understand
13
My manager handles my and my colleagues' resistance to change by explaining convincingly why the change is necessary
14 My manager informs on how far the company has reached with the change process
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Lead Employees
# To consider/Consideration Weakness
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Strength
10 Do not know
15 My manager is clear about responsibilities that my job comprise
16 My manager sets reasonable demands on me
17 My manager believes in me
18 My manager listens to me 19 My manager shows interest in my work
20 My manager treats me with respect
21 My manager has empathy and care about my well-‐being
22 My manager discusses my career goals with me
23 My manager helps me to develop a plan for how to achieve my career goals
24 My manager gives me challenging assignments and the opportunity to grow
25 My manager gives me constructive feedback on what I can improve
26 My manager encourages me with praise for my work
27 My manager is acting as advisor to me in my work when I ask for it
28 My manager motivates me
29 My manager is straight, open and honest with me
30 My manager can speak up to me and my colleagues, if necessary
31 My manager shows commitment to its work
32 My manager has the skills required to lead its team effectively
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Manage Change
# To consider/Consideration Weakness
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Strength
10 Do not know
33 My manager is positive towards change
34 My manager involves me so that I may participate and influence the change meaning within the team I belong
35 My manager shows understanding and supportive during changes
36 My manager is committed to change
37 My manager is active throughout the change
38 My manager drives the changes within the team I belong
39 My manager completes the changes and ensure that they remain
40 My manager ensures that we celebrate successful change within our team
Strategic Planning
# To consider/Consideration Weakness
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Strength
10 Do not know
41 My manager has the ability to interpret the company's overall strategy for the team I belong
42 My manager involves me to discuss what must be done for us to contribute to the company's strategic objectives
