Leading Downsizing Processes : a Leader's Perspective

Background: How do leaders act during organisational changes which involve downsizing? The leader often ends up in focus during these processes. These issues are by no means recently developed. Already the medieval author Machiavelli wrote about leaders’ problems with leading changes. The authors of this thesis are therefore interested in how leaders act during these processes and how they think upon their own behaviour. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is hence, from a leader perspective, to investigate if there are any possibilities of identifying a specific leadership style which is used during the processes of downsizing an organisation. Research Method: To obtain the result mentioned below the authors realized five interviews with different business leaders in order to get hold of their opinions regarding the issue. What the authors did was to connect the leaders’ behaviour with the most explicable leadership style. Result: The authors came to the conclusion that the most explicable leadership styles were the directive and the transformational ones. It was also stated that the theories in this thesis were not sufficiently fulfilling in answering the purpose