With authoritative leadership
Hasemann meant leaders who were delegating and
telling, related to the followers both flexibly and decisively
and made firm and impartial decisions. Non Authoritarian
leaders, by contrast, related to employees on a more personal
level and were striving to please the employees and
make them happy. Albinsson and Stang [46], in interviewing
32 experienced nursing home employees about how
they thought the leader should function to achieve high
quality of care, found that task-oriented behaviour characterized
by well-defined leadership, goal formulation and
care planning was emphasised as decisive in this regard. In
a study at a relatively large Swedish hospital, Sellgren et al.
[47] investigated the difference between staff and nurse
managers in their preferences of leadership style for
achieving high quality of care. They found that subordinates
preferred leaders that took an active and clear leadership
role and focused on production-orientated aspects
of leadership rather than relationship-orientated aspects.
Because studies in nursing homes have been rather few
and inconclusive, it is difficult to draw conclusions regarding
which leadership style has the strongest effect on quality
of care. In general, however, leadership studies has
shown task-orientated leadership style to be the most
influential of the two in relation to productivity - which in
many cases overlap with quality of care. We therefore
expected that both leadership styles will be systematically
related to quality of care, but that the effect of taskoriented
leadership will be the strongest.