| dc.description.abstract | In recent years, Swedish public sector has undergone a change in its governance and
management model, from the so called New Public Management to a model where trust plays
a key role. In comparison to the more heroic vision of a strong leader within New Public
Management, Trust-leadership attaches importance to the leader being humble and trusting
his or her employees, which achieves mutual trust between the manager and the employees.
Trust-leadership also puts more emphasis on the employees.
The purpose of this report is to investigate whether, and if so, how the shift from New Public
Management to Trust-leadership in the public sector is reflected in the recruitment of
managers. More specifically, our aim is to investigate and compare job advertisements from
two different time periods to find out whether this change is noticeable.
Our study is designed as a document analysis of job advertisements aimed at managers in the
public sector, in particular within municipalities. We have selected three different professions; Chief Financial Officer, Principal and Head of Unit. In total, we have reviewed 30
advertisements from the years 2005/2006 and 2020. Our analysis revealed five themes that reoccured
in the advertisements.
Our central findings are that Trust-leadership is, to a relative large extent, evident in today’s
work advertisements and that we can see a transition from New Public Management to Trustleadership
over time. The most evident is that employeeship (Sw. “medarbetarskap”),
relationships and communication have a larger scope in the ads from 2020, which is in line
with what the literature describes about Trust-leadership. However, it differs between the
three professions and the transition is more evident for two of them. The conclusions drawn
from the study are that today’s work advertisements reflect Trust-leadership to a great extent
and that the type of leaders that are in demand has changed over time. | sv |
