Theory of leadership for quality

Total Quality Management Vol. 17, No. 1, 41 –60, January 2006

A Theory of Leadership for Quality: Lessons from TQM for Leadership Theory1
C. LAKSHMAN
Department of Management & Marketing, Virginia State University, Petersburg, USA

ABSTRACT Despite their implications for the management of quality in organizations, leadership theories have not explicitly focused on quality and on the roleof leaders as managers of quality. Building on recent attempts in the leadership and total quality management literatures, this article develops a theory of leadership for quality, focusing on leader traits, values, and behaviours based on underlying TQM principles. Contributions of the TQM literature to the leadership literature are identified and discussed. A set of leader traits, values, andbehaviours are extracted from the TQM philosophy and integrated into an articulation of a theory of leadership based on these constructs. The core principles of TQM are addressed and a number of propositions are developed, identifying both generic and specific leader behaviours in the domains of customer focus, teamwork and participation, and continuous improvement. The theory developed here makesincremental contributions by examining these hitherto unexamined behaviours in the leadership literature. The framework adds value to the literature by embedding key leadership constructs in organizational processes. Contributions to the TQM and leadership literature, limitations of the approach, and implications for research and practice are discussed. KEY WORDS : Leadership, total qualitymanagement, theory

Introduction The role of managing quality is essential in today’s environment, as evidenced by the popularity of the TQM movement and the success it has brought to a number of organizations (Easton & Jarrell, 1998; Douglas & Judge, 2001; Hendricks & Singhal, 1997). However, the role of leadership in managing quality is relatively unaddressed in the leadership literature. Despite theacknowledgement of the construct validity of the Total Quality Management philosophy by organizational behaviour researchers (Hackman & Wageman, 1995) and its importance to the field of management theory (e.g. Anderson et al., 1994; Dean & Bowen, 1994; Spencer, 1994), research on quality management as

Correspondence Address: C. Lakshman, Department of Management & Marketing, Virginia StateUniversity, PO Box 9209, Petersburg, VA 23806, USA. Email: clakshma@vsu.edu 1478-3363 Print=1478-3371 Online=06=010041–20 # 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080=14783360500249729

42

C. Lakshman

a legitimate role of leaders has not received much attention (Waldman, 1993) in any of the approaches to leadership research (see House & Aditya, 1997 for a review of the multiple approaches). Thus, thepotential for integrating the leadership literature with the quality management literature is great and is likely to be beneficial for both theory and practice. This article is an attempt at such integration of the leadership and quality management literatures. The growing literature on total quality management stresses the importance of TQM to organizational performance and has repeatedly stressedthe lack of leadership support for the failure of many TQM initiatives. Some investigators have examined the implementation of total quality management and its impact on organizational performance (e.g. Douglas & Judge, 2001; Jayaram et al., 1999), with both sets of researchers identifying strong positive relationships between the implementation of total quality management and performance (see alsoHendricks & Singhal, 1997). Several researchers in the total quality and management literatures have pointed to the importance of the role of leadership in managing quality (e.g. Anderson et al., 1994; Dean & Bowen, 1994; Repenning & Sterman, 2002). Hackman & Wageman’s (1995) analysis concluded that the founders of the movement view quality as the ultimate and inescapable responsibility of top...