Summary:

Personnel managers are vital to organizations with humans as their most important capital. Their ability to inspire employees, to help them develop and to manage the expertise the employees represent is important to the competitiveness of the organization.
This master thesis concerns personnel management in a county governor’s office. For data collection, a qualitative approach was chosen. 13 personnel managers and 13 employees were interviewed, the interviews with employees were used to adjust the leader profiles formed based on the data. Theoretically, the thesis is based on Ichad Adizes’ PAIE model, as well as on Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn’s analytical tool CVF (Competing Values Framework), and furthermore draws on Torodd Strand and David Ulrich’s contributions when it comes to the application of these framework in analyzing management in general and personnel management specifically.
An important finding in this study is the considerable variation in how personnel managers define and execute their role. The data still reveal that a plurality of the personnel managers at the county governor’s office followed Leadership Strategy I – a strategy focusing on inclusion and collaboration. All personnel managers using this strategy are women. However, no other patterns related specifically to gender were found.
The choice of Leadership Strategy I can to a certain extent by explained by pressure from external factors, such as restructuring processes or a heavy workload. Such pressure is also relevant in the choice of Leadership Strategy P, an academic and production-oriented strategy which leads to managers prioritizing task solving over the people they are responsible for.
However, characteristics of the employees explain variation in the personnel management to a larger degree than external pressure does. Knowledge workers tend to expect an individual focus from their personnel managers.