Objectives and aims of the intervention

5.3.1 Effect goals

Against the background described above, it seemed important to develop an inter-vention based on leadership as a relationship, where the outcome of the interinter-vention largely depends on the social exchange between the two parties. First step and preparation for the intervention is a pre-test questionnaire aiming to screen relevant aspects of the relationship between leaders and team members.

The intervention aims at changing leaders’ behaviour into a more rewarding and health supporting form and will demonstrate whether leadership behaviour can be improved by training on-the-job and whether this potential improvement in leaders’

behaviour is positively reflected in the employees’ psychological wellbeing and

health. In addition, we are interested in identifying the mechanisms behind any im-provement in employees’ wellbeing and health.

5.3.2 Intervention (process) goals

A first step in the development of the intervention modules was to clarify specific goals for individuals, groups and organizations participating in the intervention. These more detailed goals should be matched with relevant content which makes it possible to achieve the goals. The process can be evaluated, as well as the expected effects for leaders. We formulated goals for the intervention which relate to leaders, the team, individual followers and the whole organization.

In line with our ideas in the application, other researchers have confirmed that pro-grams with training and coaching had better results than training only (SPENCE, CAVANAGH & GRANT, 2008). The goals for the intervention for the participating leaders should include clear areas for improvements. One suggestion could be to use four main areas for the individual leaders (HART, CONKLIN & ALLEN, 2008).

The areas are listed below together with the planned methods used to reach each goal. Each methods will then be described in more detail in following sections. A summary of goals, planned activities and content and evaluation criteria of the pro-cess goals is shown below in table 5.3.

5.3.3 Organizational-level goals

On the organizational level the goals set up were even more limited since we did not expect that our intervention would have any large impact on this level.

Increase insights about the relationship between leadership and health: This should be obtained by involving not only leaders and their subordinates but also the upper management in lectures, and by providing information about the project, etc.

5.3.4 Group-level goals

The following goals were planned on the team level. Since the main target group for the intervention was the leaders, we had slightly lower ambitions on the team level:

Improved working methods: This should be obtained through group discussions about goals and methods for work and workshops resulting in practical changes made by participants in areas such as cooperation, routines, allocation of work.

Changes in the view of work: This should be obtained by increasing knowledge about the relationship between work and stress in lectures, workshops, and practical impli-cations of the intervention (e.g. improved cooperation, psychological climate).

5.3.5 Goals for leaders

Personal growth: This includes the areas self-reflection, self-efficacy in relation to health promotion and leadership. Methods plan to reach this goal were: leaders should write diaries for self-reflection, participate in workshops with other leaders in the intervention group, and get individual coaching.

Conceptual understanding: Leaders should gain new knowledge about leadership as a social process and its effects on health and wellbeing of leaders and their subordi-nates. This should be obtained by means of lectures and leader workshops on topics such as leadership theory and health, transformational leadership, dialogue and per-spective taking, psychological contracts as a theory about the employment relation-ship and how to use it as part of individualized consideration, decision making and participative leadership, empowerment, and leadership in teams.

Feedback on relevant leadership behaviour: All participating leaders will get feedback on their leadership in feedback reports from T1 questionnaire, including a range of leadership scales and team climate measures. Furthermore, they will also get feed-back from the observations of team communication and finally in individual coaching.

Skill-building: Leaders should develop key leadership skills related to the goals. This should be obtained by means of workshops on relevant areas including training such as communication and dialogue competence, perspective taking, and work task analyses (ARIA-model).

5.3.6 Goals for followers

Through a better teamclimate, and a more positive interaction between the leader and followers in the team, the intervention aimed to reduce stressors, to increase ressources (as task characteristics) and thus finally to have a positive impact on health and wellbeing of followers.

Tab. 5.3 Goals, and contents of the intervention on different levels

Goals Content Method/process Evaluation

Organization

The table also refers to different levels of learning (assimilation, accommodation, me-ta-learning) taken from “Evaluation as learning – A study of social worker education in Leningrad County” by KARLSSON VESTMAN (2004).

The following modules have been developed:

 Lectures

 Team Workshops

 Leader Workshops

 Observation

 Diary Writing

 Coaching

In the following, we describe in detail these modules. Figure 5.1 on the next page provides an overview of the time schedules in Sweden and Germany for the different modules. A time schedule was part of our original application. The process has been discussed in detail during all our project meetings, starting in Tampere 2010. Some minor modifications in the scheduling of activities have been made mostly because of necessary adjustments to location and number of leaders and teams involved. The most intense discussions however have concerned the content of the activities in or-der to manage to make the intervention as similar as possible in both countries. Nev-ertheless, some differences in the order of modules occurred between Sweden and Germany, as time constraints, and needs of participating organizations, and teams had to be taken into account. Further, some slight differences occurred in conducting the intervention, both between teams and between Germany and Sweden. This was intended, as we promised the teams tailored interventions. Some deviations between the procedures in Germany and Sweden can also be explained with certain methods being culture-specific.

Fig. 5.1 Gantt chart for the intervention in Germany, and Sweden

T1