The Role of Leadership in Promoting Quality Management: A Study on the Chittagong City Corporation, Bangladesh

Abstract

Leadership plays a crucial role in ensuring quality management in
an organization. The purpose of this article is to examine the roles of leadership
in quality management relating to the Chittagong City Corporation (CCC),
one of the major urban government units in Bangladesh. This study is guided
by the European Foundation of Quality Management (EFQM) model, which
is a quality assessment tool designed to evaluate an organization’s quality
management capacity. This paper will focus on the role of leadership because
it is one of the major “enabler” components of the EFQM model for quality
management. When talking about quality management in an organization,
leaders develop and facilitate the achievement of the mission and vision of the
organization. They also develop organizational values and systems required
for sustainable success and implement these via their actions and behaviours.
In relation to this study, both quantitative and qualitative data collection
methods were used to gather and analyse that information. Quantitative data
were collected from a total of 142 participants, including selective Chittagong
City Corporation offi cials, city inhabitants, government offi cials and NGO and
civil society personnel by using a structured questionnaire. The fi ndings of
this study reveal that the CCC leadership has played a positive role in their
interaction with the customers, partners and representatives of society. Data
also revealed that the leaders of CCC reinforce a culture of improvement in their
support of staff and they tend to identify and promote organizational change.
However, our data also found that leaders/managers of CCC are not aware
of the necessity to develop the mission, vision, values and ethics of quality
management in the organization and they lack the quality or capacity to be a
proper role model for a culture of excellence, even though they are personally
involved in the development, implementation and continuous improvement
process of the CCC. This study suggests that the leaders/managers of CCC
need to develop a properly structured organizational mission, vision, value
framework and system that is essential to improve the quality of management
in the organization.