Healthy and effective leadership in organisation

Johan Larsson
Univerisitets Tryckeri, 2010.- 184 s.
ISBN 987-91-633-6521-8

Johan Larsson, forskare vid Mittuniversitet, har efter sin avhandling fått stor uppmärksamhet i media både i Sverige och USA. Boken som är skriven på engelska uppmärksammar betydelsen av ledarskapet för medarbetarnas hälsa och organisationens effektivitet. Innehållet behandlar kritiska element och beskriver framgångsrika strategier till nytta för chefer, hr-specialister och andra personer som är intresserade av ledarskap eller ledarskapsutveckling.

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Resumée in english:

Leadership is a crucial factor in the long-term success of an organisation. A manager in the position of being able to use leadership to influence both organisational outcomes such as effectiveness and quality and worker health. From a global perspective, interest in workplace health is a rapidly growing issue. At the same time, there are few academic  studies on the impact of manageral leadership on worker health. This work examines these critical concerns and describes successful strategies which can help to increase organisational effectiveness, build quality in an organisation and improve employee health.

The five empirical studies underlying this book look at a number of successful organisations from a leadership perspective. The studies focus on a central question; How can managers both build effective organisations and have healty employees? The book answers with a description, discussion and outline of winning strategies concerning elements of leadership values and behaviours to use along with supportive leadership tools such as management control models for health.

A new, statistically supported early-warning system wich targets worker health is one important outcome from this resarch. The system uses a tool called "control chart" to assess the numerical indicators of self-assessed general health and new sick-cases per employee. The system is sensitive to both minor and major changes and the subjective health indicator also predicts sickness trends. Managers have advanced warning and can act on measured health changes before they cause significantly increased levels of employee sickness. The system has a few false alarms; no more than once 30 years when the recommended frequency of monthly control charts is followed.

Besides the results from empirical studies and accompanying theoretical models, this book includes systematic reviews of other studies from around the world within the area of leadership. Serveral practical insights and guidelines can be found and the book concludes with the description of my integrative model of successful leadership.

This book is for managers, human resorce specialists, academic student or other persons interested in the topic of leadership and leadership development.

"A successful leadership profile needs to intergrate a positive view of humanity with high relationship orientation behaviour, where structure- and change- oriented behaviours are adapted to the situation."

Johan Larsson holds a Ph.D. in the field of Quality Technology and Management. His undergraduate degress, M.Sc. and B.Sc., are in the related area of Industrial Economics. Johan is a Researcher at Mid Sweden University. He also owns and operates the consultancy Q from Z. Johan´s Doctoral Thesis is titled "Leadership of Quality, Effectiveness and Health in Organisations". He is also one of the authors of the book "Att styra med hälsa - från statistik till strategi (to Control with Health - From Statistics to Strategy)".