On the Relationship between Leadership, Industry and Quality

This paper explores the relationship between organizational leadership styles and success in implementing quality in organizations. Using criteria summarized from a review of the leadership literature and information available on the web, a list of 176 leaders was identified by the authors, out of which 144 leaders were found to be supportive of quality initiatives. The leaders were sorted using a q-sort technique into ten popular leadership styles as identified by Manktelow (2007). The ten popular leadership styles were condensed for analysis into two broad categories: employee-oriented leadership style and production-oriented leadership style. For leaders who have implemented quality initiatives, the employee-oriented leadership style was more popular than the production-oriented style by almost a 4 to 1 ratio. Across eight different industry categories the percentage of employee-oriented leaders ranged from a low of 65% in retail/wholesale to a high of 100% in agriculture/mining/construction and government/non-profit groups. However, these differences were not found to be statistically significant.