Sustaining a quality initiative: how leadership and culture are key to success

Citation

(2002), "Sustaining a quality initiative: how leadership and culture are key to success", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 6 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2002.26706bab.003

Sustaining a quality initiative: how leadership and culture are key to success

Sustaining a quality initiative: how leadership and culture are key to success

What are the most important factors to consider when introducing a quality initiative? Should you focus on process and people in equal measures? And how could you ensure that this program is sustained on an ongoing basis?

It is widely accepted that there is more to implementing TQM than simply reworking a few processes and advising employees of your intentions. Organizations must cultivate the right mindset throughout their workforce and ensure that this mode of thinking is promoted on a continual basis. In short, culture and leadership are crucial. This has been well documented as far back as 1951, yet there has been little empirical research to measure just how big a role these two elements play.

In the majority of successful quality organizations, leaders are seen as transformational, empowering and with vision. They promote teamwork and knowledge sharing in order to produce a behavioral infrastructure or "culture". This in turn leads to increased productivity and/or enhanced customer satisfaction. So, if employees see their leaders as more committed and supportive, will they feel that TQM values are more integrated into the organization? And can a TQM initiative bring about a "constructive" culture and increase employee satisfaction as well as productivity?

These were the issues addressed in a study by Kim Buch and Drew Rivers of a medium-sized utility firm in the USA following the introduction of a TQM initiative. The organization adopted a quality program from a Fortune 500 company that also helped to introduce the scheme. Implementations included:

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  establishment of a mission, vision and principal guidelines;

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  formation of quality steering teams, or QSTs (including managers and directors);

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  continuous education and training on a company-wide basis.

Over a seven-year period (both before and during the program), department performance and employee perceptions/attitudes were measured. Owing to a merger three years into the scheme, the organization was involved in a massive business restructuring plan which was incorporated within the TQM project.

Findings suggest that the quality program did initially succeed. QSTs encouraged leaders to adopt new training methods and staff participated in quality improvement projects. Employees felt empowered through these developments and consequently their satisfaction levels increased. A quality culture had apparently been attained. But opinions seemed to alter mid-way through the program, and by the final measurement, satisfaction levels had dropped to below pre-intervention levels and feelings of empowerment or development had all but disappeared.

So why did the utility company fail to sustain its TQM culture and what part, if any, did leaders play in this downturn?

One contributing factor was the lack of perceived support for the project. Although 40 percent of employees thought their leaders were committed to the quality improvement efforts and 55 percent believed their managers to be behind the initiative itself, the mean ratings of these results over the years indicate that, ultimately, employees saw leadership support as more neutral than anything else.

Leading by example is considered something of a cliché these days, but there is a reason for its continual appearance in management journals, articles and magazines across the globe – it works! If employees do not feel their leader is 100 percent behind a project, how can they be expected to follow whole-heartedly? The mean statistics show an ambivalence in leadership support, although in the beginning, the perceived commitment was there. Surely something must have caused the leaders' opinions to change, or their interest to wane.

In order to ascertain what had changed, interviews were conducted with senior management, quality directors and QST leaders. From these consultations, it transpired that certain internal and external events led to the breakdown of their newly established culture through what is known as threat-rigidity response.

According to the threat-rigidity response, any perceived threat induces a certain inflexibility or over-reliance on tried and tested, dominant responses. This has been observed in a number of organizations when environmental threats, or potential change, have caused leaders to fall back on established procedures. Their style of management becomes conservative, narrowly focussed and autocratic, and decisions tend to be made at higher levels of the company.

The changes experienced through merger and re-engineering had evidently posed external and internal threats to the utility firm. Managers who were previously willing to try new leadership styles, utilize teams and generally align their approach with the new quality initiative felt threatened by the re-structure of the merger and reverted to their more traditional methods. Employees had apparently sensed this withdrawal of leadership support from the quality project (as opinion measurements demonstrated) and consequently felt a lack of empowerment.

This response was compounded by the re-engineering project that occurred as a result of the merger. The project was introduced as part of the overall TQM initiative and described as another tool for achieving quality. In reality, the re-engineering effort resulted in dramatic changes to employees' duties due to the re-design of major work processes. This sudden and unwelcome change (as perceived by front-line employees) would be more than likely to elicit a threat-rigidity response. Not only was this change unwelcome but it was rolled out as part of the TQM initiative. Although business process re-engineering (BPR) and TQM are both quality tools, they are fairly separate entities – one concentrates on actual processes while the other focusses on mindsets and empowerment – and as such, have very different approaches. Thus BPR in this instance could be extremely detrimental to the perceived quality culture as cultivated by the TQM program.

Despite the apparent failure to sustain a quality culture, measurements indicate that the organization experienced a consistent and sustained improvement in productivity and performance. Of course, as employee dissatisfaction was only just beginning to surface, future measurements could tell a different story. This all depends on how far culture impinges on productivity in this company – whether the dissatisfaction felt by employees would eventually manifest itself through less effective output, regardless of new processes. Although this study has shown how leadership influences culture, it is not entirely clear how much culture impacts productivity.

Many of the lessons learnt by this utility firm are not just specific to quality. Evidently, culture and leadership are crucial to the success of any new initiative and at present, appear inextricably linked. Sustaining your new culture is extremely difficult, especially in the face of both internal and external threats. In today's organizations, these challenges are inevitable in one form or another. This is where leadership could be key to your success. It is essential that leaders are aware of their ability to influence outcomes of planned change, and will be prepared to accept transformations without any hint of the threat-rigidity response. Although this is the most difficult time for leaders, it is also the most crucial. To introduce an initiative is to think successful; to sustain it is to be successful.

This review is of "TQM: the role of leadership and culture" by Kim Buch, of the University of North Carolina, USA, and Drew Rivers, of The Ashton Brand Group, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. It was originally published in Leadership and Organization Development, Vol. 22 No. 8, 2001, pp. 365-71.

Comment: This case study has a slightly academic feel but offers a clear and concise insight into the importance of leadership in TQM. Hypotheses are proposed clearly and argued with the use of evaluative data. The discussion of results provides a number of managerial implications that would prove highly useful when implementing not just a quality initiative, but any change program.