Introduction
Leadership is mandatory for all organizations. It determines whether a company or an organization succeeds in achieving its goals and objectives or it fails in doing so. In fact, the quality of leadership that is practiced in an organization defines and differentiates successful organizations from unsuccessful ones.
This implies that effective leadership is essential for the success of any organization. Therefore, leadership in total quality management is defined and characterized by the fundamental instructions of the gurus based on organisational leadership (Winder & Draeger, 2006). Quality leadership is ethical, focused on people, creates an awareness of social responsibility, and puts emphasis on the quality of employees’ working conditions.
Without good leadership and management structures, an organisation is likely to fall into a leadership crisis, either because of low confidence levels in the leaders or lack of trust in the workers/employees (Luria, 2008). Therefore, integrity and public confidence in business leaders is crucial for quality leadership to prevail in an organisation. This essay discusses leadership in quality management, detailing the relationship between leadership and quality.
Leadership and Quality
Many scholars have written about the importance of leadership as an important part of quality management. Quality leadership includes management commitment, and it prescribes strategies to achieve quality management within organizations. Therefore, organisations or individuals who intend to practice quality leadership must first begin by taking a careful examination of the organisational culture and the leadership capacity at stake.
In the current business and political world, quality is the foundation for continual management, innovation, creativity, and leadership (Feigenbaum, 2007).
To attain quality leadership, the top management of an organisation must take the responsibility of the quality initiative (Winder & Draeger, 2006). Ideally, leadership and quality management are closely intertwined such that integrity leadership leads to quality management. Thus, quality leadership is the foundation for frequent management innovation and creativity in many organizations.
What Quality Leadership Means
Quality leadership has been defined differently by various scholars. However, they all concur at one instance that the qualities, behaviours, and traits of a leader define the kind of leadership prevailing in an organisation. When the leader has good leadership qualities, traits, and behaviours, the leadership is termed as effective or quality leadership because it leads to integrity and employee job satisfaction.
Research provides that leadership theories and total quality management play an integral role in enhancing organisational performance and increased employee job satisfaction in an organization. Total quality management promotes quality leadership unlike traditional organisations, whose leadership focus is based on internal systems only.
Therefore, quality leadership is characterised by the following: strategic leadership that encourages integration of internal systems with external environment; visionary leadership where employees share a common vision and goals; employee motivation through designed rewarding systems for stakeholders to promote creativity and innovation; and empowerment and teamwork by having all the employees takes active roles in leadership.
These characteristics differentiate a total quality management organization, practicing quality leadership, from a traditional organisation that is conservative.
Quality leadership is measured by the leadership style organisational leaders decide to embrace in leading their organizations. Research provides that transformational leadership style is the most related leadership style to quality leadership. It entails searching for opportunities to motivate the employees by satisfying their basic needs and assigning them responsibilities in the work process.
This has a direct relationship with leadership quality because transformational leaders are capable of developing good rapport or effective communication with employees to strengthen values, and inspire a vision that is focused on quality. In addition, transformational leaders build trust, reduce fear, create awareness for change and develop a culture to support the change, and initiate new tactics to solve organisational complexity (Luria, 2008).
This encourages quality improvement across all the systems and departments in the organisation. Deming (2000) denotes that “the job of management is not supervision, but rather leadership” (p. 54). This implies that transformational leadership requires the managers to be leaders so that they can deliver quality leadership.
In fact, quality leadership involves a predominance of quality principles that form “a basis for guiding, empowering and supporting the constant pursuit of excellence by the employees throughout the organisation” (Feigenbaum, 2007, p 38). Therefore, emphasis is put on the leader to create an environment of trust, sincerity, and truthful communication to encourage the development of the individual quality improvement workforce.
Furthermore, in quality leadership, the leader ensures that there is a continual system improvement so that every employee does a better job with greater satisfaction. Deming (2000) argues that a transformational leader is not a judge, but rather a colleague leading and guiding employees on a daily basis, and learning from them and with them.
As a result quality leadership is built on the leadership principles provided above with integrity, people focus, and empowerment on the lead. Those principles, including others, must be applied in a coordinated manner in any company that anticipates achieving quality management.
This participatory approach to leadership, whereby, employees throughout the organisation are empowered and encouraged to become leaders is essential because quality becomes the responsibility of everyone in the organisation and not a few individuals. Some people may think that by so doing, the roles of the CEO would be diminished.
However, this might not be true because empowerment adds the CEOs more responsibilities to create an environment for planning at lower levels. Actually, employee empowerment means that the workforce is encouraged and motivated to improve on the quality of the services it provides to the organisation and the society.
Empowered employees feel comfortable when making decisions because they trust and believe that their company is committed to their development. However, this can only be achieved through team management skills that leaders must embrace. Therefore, quality leadership prevails in an organisation when the organisation is a leader-based, and the leadership capacity is entrenched throughout the organisation (Winder and Draeger, 2006).
A leader-based organization enables employees to look at senior leaders as members or colleagues and not individuals in charge of others. Therefore, leaders who invest in empowering employees to be leaders portray quality management and leadership skills.
The most integral part in quality leadership is knowledge sharing among team members, mentoring, instructing others, and facilitating group processes. Moreover, it entails promoting openness in communication, allocating resources effectively, providing information, and monitoring group performance (Deming, 2000).
Therefore, the qualities a leader must portray to lead an organisation toward total quality management culture include motivation, honesty and integrity, self confidence, and drive. Other qualities include cognitive ability, charisma, and business knowledge. Despite this, integrity and honesty are the most important traits in leadership and they form a basis for quality leadership depends on.
Leadership Quality Criteria
The most widely used leadership quality criteria is criteria for performance excellence developed by Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. This criterion divides leadership into categories. For instance, the first category focuses on the ways in which leaders provide guidance, communicate and encourage organizational performance, and offer leadership services.
The criteria also support the idea that visionary leadership is an important value and concept in an organisation (Baldrige National Quality Program, 2007). Thus, effective leaders put in place systems, which give directions to employees, set realistic goals for employees, develop clear vision, and ensure that the organization attains performance excellence.
Quality leadership requires senior leaders to play the role of inspiring, motivating, and encouraging the entire team of employees to contribute positively to organisational development through innovation.
Therefore, according to Baldrige National Quality Program (2007), “as role models, the leaders can underpin ethics, values, and expectations while building leadership, commitment and initiative throughout the organisation” (p. 1). In summary, the performance excellence criterion provides that effective leadership system entails the establishment of mechanisms to enable the leader to carry out personal examination, receive feedback and improve the organisational sustainability.
Conclusion
In summary, quality leadership involves approaches that tend toward leadership traits such as empowerment, vision, strategic viewpoint, people focus, and involvement of various disciplines. Moreover, integrity and an awareness of social responsibility form the foundation of quality leadership and management (Winder & Draeger, 2006).
Quality leadership recognizes the value of change. Therefore, leaders anticipate change and respond to it accordingly to allow the organisation to continue growing by exploring new ideas (Deming, 2000). Moreover, quality leadership involves the application of leadership strategies that encourage collaboration and teamwork, humility and forbearance, and strategic planning. Finally, quality leadership plays an important role in promoting total quality management in an organisation.
References
Baldrige National Quality Program. (2007). Leadership Criteria for performance excellence. Retrieved from https://www.nist.gov/
Deming, W.E. (2000). Out of the Crisis. New York: MIT Press.
Feigenbaum, A.V. (2007). The international growth of quality. Quality Progress, 40(2), 36-40.
Luria, G. (2008). Controlling for quality: Climate, leadership and behavior. Quality Management Journal, 15 (1), 27-40.
Winder, R. E & Draeger, J. (2006). Resilient leadership: integrating stability and agility in the five dimension leadership model. ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement, 4(2), 1-14.