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This paper aims to present the opinions of teaching staff at Spanish universities regarding the relative importance of a number of quality factors, and perceived levels of development of those factors in the context of their work.

The paper takes an empirical approach, with the opinions of teaching staff being collected via questionnaires and by telematic means.

Lecturers surveyed are particularly pessimistic in regard to the conditions in which students enter university, and probably do not share the priorities that education policy authorities and university management bodies proclaim in their discourses and policies.

This research may be supplemented with the use of more qualitative methods and extended to other geographical and cultural contexts.

The opinions of teaching staff comprise useful information for the design of education policies and quality management systems applicable to Spanish universities.

No studies have to date been conducted in Spain to identify the opinions of university teaching staff in regard to determinants of quality. Taken as a whole, the paper enables a diagnostic analysis to be made of university education quality conditions in Spain from the viewpoint of teaching staff.

This work analyses quality management (through the European Foundation for Quality Management-EFQM-model) and transformational leadership in hotels in Spain.

The study analyses 102 5-star and 5-star large luxury hotels that answer a questionnaire on transformational leadership and the EFQM model. It analyses the degree of importance of quality and transformational leadership in hotels, the significant differences between groups of hotels (according to stars, size, modality and type of product) and the association between transformational leadership and quality.

The results show the levels of quality and transformational leadership, minor significant differences between groups and an association between the two variables. In general, chain-affiliated hotels have a higher level of leadership and a more advanced employee and process management than independent hotels. Also, those hotels that focus on a vacational product show a lower attention to the strategy dimension in the EFQM model. The number of employees is not an important factor to adopt quality. Finally, transformational leadership allows hotels to advance in the development of quality management.

Although there are studies on quality management that show the importance of leadership for quality, there are few studies that examine transformational leadership and quality in the same study, mainly in the tourism industry, and especially in the case of the hotel industry.