The business climate of today demands high flexibility and quick responsiveness from suppliers.It has become essential for organizations to have effective leaders in all hierarchallevels, which understand and are able to work under these conditions. As the market requirementshave changed, a new paradigm of leadership has evolved (Bryman, 1992). Thisparadigm puts more focus on charisma and how to motivate followers, which is the essentialpart of transformational leadership. According to Burns (1978), transformational leadershipis a process between leader and follower rather than exchanges. This leads to thequestion of what effective leadership is and if it can be measured in some way. Onemethod is the use of the Multifactor leadership questionnaire, the MLQ-test, developed byBass 1985 from the full range model.The conducted research for this thesis is done at PaperPak Sweden AB, a manufacturer ofdisposable incontinence products located in Aneby, Småland.The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate if any differences and/or similarities in leadershipcan be found between or within the hierarchical levels. The intent with the report is also toinvestigate those variances and if they are positive or negative for an organization.A theoretical framework focusing on leadership has been collected, to enable the fulfillmentof the thesis purpose. This framework will act as support for the analysis of the quantitativeinvestigation, based on the MLQ-test. From this analysis, the authors have madeconclusions and recommendations. The degree of transformational, transactional and laissez-faire leadership has been measured for the three leadership levels top, middle and lowmanagement. It could be argued that the top management should show the highest degreeof transformational leadership, and low management the least, due to their positions andwork tasks. The result of the analysis supported that theory to a large extent. However,lower management showed a significantly higher degree of transformational leadershipthan middle management. One explanation could be that middle management lives in amore stressful situation, working between top and low management, compared to the othertwo, which is supported by Grout (1994).Since the theoretical findings mean that leadership can be learnt and developed, the authorssuggest that organizations always have to follow up and try to develop their leaders andmanagers towards higher d...
