Content area
Full text
Introduction
Leadership is significantly related to organizational culture and business excellence (Wiengarten et al., 2015). However, leadership styles varied for different organizational cultures. The current quality management (QM) literature in fact evidences that transformational types of leadership are most appropriate models of leadership in the QM context (Dean et al., 2015). Moreover, literature also suggests there is a link between organizational culture and organizational excellence (Al-Dhaafri et al., 2016; Zu et al., 2011; Haffar et al., 2017; Sinha and Dhall, 2018). Leadership and organizational culture therefore are closely related during the entire life cycle of organizational excellence. Several business excellence models, therefore, have identified the importance of leadership; it is also a criterion of many well-known organizational excellence models. This implies that leadership styles need to evolve as the maturities of organizational excellence and Organizational evolve. Hence, the relationships between transformational leadership, organizational culture and business excellence must be studied to advance society's knowledge of the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational culture and thus achieve sustainable organizational excellence. Therefore, two key research questions underline this study: (1) What is the relationship between transformational leadership and the different types of organizational culture? (2) How do transformational leadership and organizational culture affect organizational excellence?
This type of analysis is important because it considers relationships between different types of organizational culture models alongside different types of organizational performance (Denison and Mishra, 1995; Para-González et al., 2018) – for example, customer results and business results. Moreover, if such relationships exist, it is important for firms to understand these relationships because they can either enable or limit a firm's ability to achieve its strategic goals. In essence, the purpose of this paper is to posit a dynamic relationship between transformational leadership, organizational culture and organizational excellence to develop a better understanding of the causal linkages among these three areas. Despite the robust evidence for the direct relationship between organizational culture and total QM (TQM), the mechanisms underlying this relationship have not been fully explored and have received little empirical attention (Haffar et al., 2017). In fact it is stated that more research should be conducted to investigate the relationship between transformational leadership and other organizational antecedents such as structure and culture (Jabnoun...