The effect of leadership styles on Total Quality Management (TQM)-A suggested model- An applied study on the mobile service companies in Egypt

Abstract
TQM is a fast becoming a key issue in the industry. The leadership style is at the heart of our understanding of the successful TQM implementation. To date no study clarified how leadership styles affect TQM implementation. This study aims at empirically investigates the significant impact of leadership styles on TQM implementation in the telecommunication for mobile services companies in Egypt. In contrast, most of the previous studies considered leadership as one of TQM dimensions. In addition, most commonly the previous literature discussed three types of leadership styles which are transformational, transactional and charismatic leadership. However, they discussed the effect of any type of the three on factors rather than TQM. This study seeks to investigate the effect of five leadership styles on TQM implementation. These styles include transformational leadership, transactional leadership, visionary leadership, charismatic leadership and culture based leadership. A conceptual model had been established and it had been tested using a survey data collected from a sample of 800 employees working in the Egyptian telecommunication for mobile service companies using the quantitative method and the regression analysis of results. Charismatic leadership has the strongest effect on TQM implementation. However, transformational leadership has the least effect on TQM implementation among the five mentioned leadership styles. These findings contribute to increasing the knowledge about leadership styles constructs and clarifying how these constructs affect TQM implementation. Additionally, this study provided a detailed quantitative analysis of the results of applying this research on a developing country such as Egypt. However, it suffers from its application on the service sector which is completely different from the goods manufacturing sector and from other service sectors.