Leadership is prime: how do you measure leadership excellence?

Article Type: Abstracts From: Strategic Direction, Volume 24, Issue 10

Kanji G.K. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, April 2008, Vol. 19 No. 4, Start page: 417, No of pages: 11

Purpose – presents a Leadership Excellence Index (LEI) for measuring leadership. Design/methodology/approach – touches on approaches to determine what leadership is. Builds on an earlier leadership review (2001) in an organizational context, to determine critical success factors for LE:inspiring vision; mission statement; organizational values; tackling key issues;and, aligned strategy. Gives their underlying elements structured around continuous quality improvement. Translates Kanji’s earlier Leadership Excellence Model (2001) into a scoring LEI by a structural equation model linking organizational values to LE via vision, mission, strategy and key issues. Illustrates by a Portuguese municipalities case study. Findings –outlines Portuguese municipalities’ leadership data gathering in 2000 via questionnaire. Analyses 85 returns (28 percent) by PLS. Displays the SEM with path coefficients. Concludes, from their positive values, that vision, mission,strategy and key issues are CSFs for LE through demonstrating a strong causal connection from organizational values to leadership excellence. Presents an LEI of managers’ views with staff views for three municipalities. Concludes managers’ views are somewhat inflated for each CSF and overall LEI. Attributes the gap to staff lack of trust as to whether leaders operate to their organization’s values in decision-making, and misaligned operational management. Research limitations/implications – none stated. Originality/value – provides a methodology to score leadership – the Leadership Excellence Index (LEI) – and demonstrates it using a Portuguese municipalities’ data. ISSN: 1478-3363 Reference: 37AN226

Keywords: Business excellence, Organizational culture,Critical success factors, Leadership, Organizational performance, Performance measurement (quality)