Assessing the Significance of Leadership in Improving Quality Management Systems

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Introduction 3

Background 4

Statement of the Problem 5

Research Objectives 6

Research Questions 6

Chapter Two: Literature Review 7

Total Quality Management 7

Customer Focus 8

Team-Work and Participation 9

Continuous Improvement 11

Leadership Theory and Practices 13

Chapter Three: Research Methodology 14

Research Design 15

Study Population 15

References 16

Chapter One: Introduction

Organizations are constantly exploring how they can remain competitive in a constantly changing business environment. Some of the common areas of review and improvement are the quality and performance of processes, procedures, and operations internally and externally. In the past two decades, organizations have adopted Total Quality Management (TQM) into their administration, management, and operation (Fan et al., 2016). The core elements of TQM are teamwork and participation, customer focus, and continuous improvement. These qualities operate in a triad structure that guarantees improved overall performance if implemented with the complimentary leadership values. However, the lack of the core values pertinent to the execution of TQM is a barrier to the positive performance outcome.

The commitment to managements execution of TQM determines the successful implementation of TQM practices in the organization. Organizational leaders should not be limited by organizational tradition, such as decision-making and absolving their managerial responsibilities. Managers should exhibit more leadership than traditional management norms to increase employees awareness of quality activities in TQM adoption and practices (Dabestani et al., 2014; Lakshman, 2006). Conceptual leadership is seen as a combination of values, attitudes, traits, and behaviors that positively affect the organizations long-term performance. Organizational leaders are first managers and therefore possess the knowledge of management and inherently bear managements responsibility. Conversely, not all managers bear the leadership qualities that leaders in an organization typically acquire through extensive training and experience, which gives them core leadership traits.

The practices embedded in the TQM and leadership overlap if the leaders practice embodies the core organizational values, vision, and mission. However, where an organization lacks leadership, TQM implementation requires extensive training from the staff and the leadership respective of the roles and responsibilities at different hierarchical levels (Bouranta, 2020). Both leadership and implementation of TQM have similarly routine behaviors where the emphasis is made to make changes in creating a team design and structuring combined with ultimateleadershipbehaviors. These behaviors include institutionalizing an organizational culture of quality, continuous improvement, and customer focus in the leadership.

Background

The dynamic business environment necessitates them to adopt new approaches to operations and administration to ensure they satisfy their customers and remain competitive. This approach to management requires the accommodation of a willingness to change in the organization for continuous improvement. TQM was largely adopted globally after its success in Japanese organizations and made up for the failures of the management practices practiced in the west. The core characteristics of TQM are commitment, involvement, and scientific knowledge to implement quality planning, quality control, and quality implementation (Al- Saffar and Obeidat, 2020). Notably, there are core areas where the roles and responsibilities in implementing TQM with leaders responsibilities at different organizational levels. However, the approach is not limited to leadership in exemption but is implemented at different organization levels.

While there is plenty of literature on leadership in organizations, there is a limited emphasis on quality management in this literature. The leadership theory may articulate some of the core concerns in the management but fails to address the difficulties in managing quality in an organization. This research aims to establish the core areas of leadership behaviors that are complementary to TQM practices. For example, the behavioral leadership theory promotes collaboration, teamwork, positive attitudes, core organizational values and beliefs, and relationships (Dabestani,...

…proven effective in organizations such as Apple and Amazon. Behavioral leadership theory focuses on the leadership properties that make it possible for the corporation to address the differences associated with developing common interests.

Chapter Three: Research Methodology

A qualitative methodology will be used for this study and will focus on determining the relationship of core TQM elements with contemporary leadership practices such as transformational leadership. Qualitative methodologies rely on continuous data or categorical data encoded into numerical figures to explore the relationship of variables in a study. In this study, the Structural Equation Modeling to examine the nature of a relationship between the elements of TQM, customer focus, teamwork and participation, and continuous improvement, and sharing knowledge and leadership properties such as personalized considerations, ideological influence, knowledge-driven a style ='color:#000;text-decoration: underline!important;' id='custom' target='_blank' href='https://www.paperdue.com/topic/decision-making-essays'>decision making, and motivation (Bag, 2015).

Research Design

The research design will explore how the employees in organizations where TQM has been integrated into the employees leadership roles and responsibilities contribute to the organizations performance. The regression analysis, part of the SEM, will be applied to determine the relationship of the core concepts in leadership and TQM that, while implemented simultaneously, overlap. Notably, in the SEM model, the variables are either directly or indirectly related to the variables overall impact (Bag, 2015). For this study, direct variables directly affect the variables with the organizations performance, and the indirect variables impact performance, although it is not direct. A questionnaire generated from the core principles of transformational leadership and TQM will be administered to the study population by mail to their offices and expected to submit for mailing in one week.

Study Population

The study will involve the recruitment of 100 participants in two companies where TQM and modern leadership practices. The population will include employees who work blue-collar jobs, low, middle, and high-level management employees. Several executives will also be the…