A true story of rise and fall of good leadership Riitta Viitala Department of Management and Organisation University of Vaasa Vaasa, Finland Email:riitta.viitala@uva.fi Abstract The purpose of this study is to gain more understanding about leadership as a socially constructed phenomenon at an organisational level. This paper specifically examines the factors that develop or destroy leadership that has been praised as good. The longitudinal qualitative data was gathered in a hospital in Finland. The data consisted of 52 narrations produced by head nurses. It was analysed using a content analysis method. Based on data from the first time point, the leadership there was humane: based on cooperation, confidential, ready to listen, equitable, encouraging, and supportive. Ten years later the leadership was described as bad, non-uniform, “lost” and “in transition”. Leaders felt that they were lonely and without support. The dramatic changes are related to turnover of managers, big structural changes, an unclear future and a strong emphasis on cost reduction and efficiency. The data revealed that head nurses expect and appreciate clear, caring, communicative and participative leadership from their own supervisors. The research story in the hospital indicates, that leadership demands intensive and conscious leadership in order to develop and remain as good. The main contribution of this research is the longitudinal qualitative research design which is based on narrations produced by head nurses. Additionally the study views leadership on organisational level, which is still relatively rare in the field of leadership research. Key words: leadership, head nurses, change, organisation level Introduction The quality of leadership is a target of great interest for many reasons. It has been addressed as an important factor for positive feelings (Rowold and Rohmann, 2009), organizational climate (Koene et al., 2002), optimism at work place (McColl-Kennedy and Anderson, 2002), innovativeness (Charbonnier et al., 2010), job satisfaction (Bartram and Casimir, 2007; Raja and Palanichamy, 2011), engagement to organization (Chi et al., 2008; Limsila and Ogunlana, 2008), organizational and individual learning (Camps and Rodriguez, 2011), performance on individual (Limsila and Ogunlana, 2008; Huang et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2011) and organisational level (Alimo-Metcalfe, et al., 2006; Vigoda-Gadot, 2007; Kathuria et al., 2010), and subordinate’s notion of his/her self-efficacy (Walumbwa and Hartnell, 2011), just to name a few.