Exploring the role of leadership in implementing a totalquality management system in a service environment.

Abstract

The tax administration organisation in South Africa has a large number of inactive taxpayers on its files and inaccurate records as it comprises people and corporations registered but not really paying taxes. Despite evidence suggesting that only a minority of new taxpayers end up paying tax, many new taxpayers are registered each year. The objective of this qualitative research was to explore the role of leadership in ensuring total quality management in the tax administration organisation in Durban, Umhlanga, and Pinetown. Thirteen operations managers and their supervisors at Durban, Umhlanga, and Pinetown, as well as the regional supervisor for the Durban area, were selected as participants using the purposive sampling technique. Individuals had to have been in positions of senior management, branch management, or operations management for a minimum of three years to be eligible to participate. Semi-structured and in-depth interviews were used to collect data about participants' levels ofexpertise, their sense of organisational function, their familiarity with quality and quality management, their familiarity with TQM, and their awareness of the difficulties inherent to itsuse in the service sector. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. The study's findingsshow that managers are very important not only to the change, where management's minds come to a halt, and how they frequently require and must outsource skills in their developmentand implementation of TQM, but also that active sponsorship of quality incentives proved to be a strategy used by branch leaders in designing and implementing TQM systems. The conclusions of this study were that: "Growth in TQM is dependent on topdown support and the creation of a conducive culture inside the organization," and the study participants agreed on one thing: that the executives must promote a TQM mentality within their organisations as they play a crucial role in developing the TQM strategy for their organisations and, in certain cases, the departments they directly oversee. The major recommendation of this study was that branch leaders need to be involved in serious and extensive leadership development if they areto design and implement a TQM system that will be successful since these branch leaders in the service industry may have knowledge about certain things but they definitely do not knoweverything, which makes it necessary for them to consult and rely on the information providedby experts, the people they lead, and the customersto whom they provide services.