Does good leadership automatically mean that the employee has good motivation towards working or does it also require something else? The thesis examines the difference between a good and a bad leader and what makes a leader good and what makes a leader bad.

The aim of this thesis is to study how good and bad managers influence employee motivation and use this work to develop a mission statement to make the company employees more motivated. The task is to find out which behaviours make a leader good and which bad, and what effect these behaviours have on employees.

The theoretical framework of this thesis deals with good and bad leaders as concepts. In addition, the framework also explores motivation, its origins and development.

A qualitative study was made in the autumn of 2019 to determine the research problem of the thesis. The qualitative research was conducted through in-person interviews with employees. The interviews were made face-to-face and they were also anonymous which allowed more honest results.

According to this research, good and bad leadership has an impact on employee motivation. The results revealed the ways in which good leadership motivates work and how poor leadership influences coping and work performance. The results also revealed the qualities that employee’s value in a good leader and which features should be discarded in order to avoid bad leadership.