Förskolechefens ledarskap : En studie om fem förskolechefers syn på sitt ledarskap

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to examine how five preschool managers are looking at theirleadership and what difficulties they see in their leading. To live up to my purpose I askedthe following research questions: Which parts in their mission do the five preschoolmanagers see as problematic in relation to the curriculum for preschool and the schoolsinspectorate quality investigation? How do the preschool managers describe their leader styleand leader ideals, and is their any difference between the two of them? The method of this study was qualitative interviews with five preschool managers. Theresults that I found was that the most of the preschool managers see their leadership as coproduced(like in Ludvigssons research 2009) with the teachers and that the preschoolmanagers often find other difficulties in their mission compare to the quality investigation(School inspectorate 2012). I also found that three of the five preschool managers thoughtthat they weren’t present enough in the preschools because of their many tasks. When I tried to classify the preschool managers leader style I found that they vary betweendemocratic and authoritarian leader style in decision-making like in Tennenbaum andSchmidt’s (1973, p. 4) model Continuum of Leader Behavior. My conclusion from that isthat in their complex mission the preschool managers needs to vary their leader style. Theleader style and ideal the most preschool managers seemed to describe were a democraticleader that listen to the preschool teachers and involve them in the decision making, which isa leadership style that Kurt Lewin and his colleague Ronald Lippitt (1938, see Maltén 2000,p. 63) found in their research.