Leadership in TQM Theory - Essay Example

This is an erroneous assumption, predicated on a misunderstanding of the distinction between authoritarian leadership and involved, proactive leadership. The distinction between the two is not only real but is one which makes all the difference between organisational success and failure; between organisational atrophy and organisational flexibility. As Baker et al. (1993) asserts, effective organisational leadership is a leadership which acknowledges the inherent value of delegation and autonomy but which at the same time, is present and involved; a leadership which displays, not only acumen in decision-making and strategic planning but which has the capacity to proactively to extraordinary circumstances through the utilisation of both change and crisis is management tools, such as demanded by the specific of the situation/crisis/change at hand.

The effective leader is, in other words, one who has successfully negotiated the fine balance between involvement and delegation. Defining effective leadership is a challenging endeavour and within the limits of the present research, an impossible one. Nevertheless, by clarifying the research's focus and delimiting the scope of its exploration, the study shall communicate the characteristics of the effective leader within the matrix of Total Quality Management [TQM]. The reason for selecting TQM as the theoretical paradigm from within which the characteristics of the effective leader shall be defined is not because it happens to be the most popular and result-oriented management paradigm today but because, as Gilbert (2004) notes, leadership within TQM organisations are, by definition, highly effective leaders who have successfully negotiated between the exigencies of involvement and delegation, on the one hand, and who function as the founding bloc for an organisational culture which, beyond being fundamentally founded upon strategic management and planning, is constructively responsive to both change and crisis.

Indeed, empirical studies have established that leaders within TQM organisations tends towards the display of higher levels of decision-making and strategic planning acumen than those in non-TQM organisations because strategic planning is both research-based and holistic, on the one hand and because decision-making is shared and knowledge-based, on the other. Following a review of the characteristics of the effective leader and an analysis of effective leadership within the matrix of strategic planning and decision making the research shall look towards case studies drawn from the IT sector in order to demonstrate the extent to which effective leadership is an inherently TQM one, based on an acknowledgement of the imperatives of information-based strategic planning and shared decision-making, while ineffective leadership is the very antithesis of the stated.

2 Leadership in TQM TheoryTQM is, as Easton and Jarrell (1998) maintain, a comprehensive organisational management system which is based upon the integration of several managerial perspectives, approaches and theories into one, in acknowledgement of the complexity of organisational structures themselves. However,