Presented to the college of law and management studies graduate school of business leadership university of KwaZulu Natal.

Abstract

All organisations across the private and public sector serve certain purposes and have a particular set of objectives which they seek to achieve and which is central to the ability of these organisations to effectively achieving their purpose and objectives is leadership. Leadership plays a role in spearheading and steering the organisations’ efforts towards achieving their goals and purposes. The leadership of any organisation directly influences its ability to succeed. Also fundamental to organisations’ ability to succeed are internal controls which serve the purpose of enhancing an organisation’s ability to effectively and efficiently attain their objectives as well as safeguarding the organisations’ assets, ensuring sustainability and success of these entities. Thus, it is apparent that leadership has influence over internal controls within any organisation and this study sought to determine the influence that leadership has on the implementation of adequate internal controls within a public sector organisation, the Department of Transport (DoT) in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa. This study was based on a qualitative study conducted through the semi-structured interviews upon a sample of 12 purposively selected individuals from a population of 18 employees, of the KZN DoT, who were deemed appropriate for addressing the concerns of this research. The research findings revealed that the leadership of the KZN DoT plays a significant role in the successful implementation of adequate internal controls within the organisation. From the research findings it is clear that internal controls have great impact on the ability of the organisation to carry out its core functions and the successful implementation of these internal controls is highly dependent on the leadership of KZN DoT. The research also revealed that the existing internal controls are sufficient, however, the problem is in their implementation which is as a result of understaffing, poor leadership monitoring and influence over internal controls, a lack of skills among staff, manual systems and processes as well as poor consequence management. Some of the feasible recommendations which were made include lobbying for funds to carry out recruitment of more staff and the automation of systems as well as processes; training of existing staff in order to improve their competencies; and implementing better consequence management throughout the whole organisation. These recommendations, if heeded, will result in improved implementation of internal controls enhancing the ability to achieve organisational goals as well as improved overall performance for the KZN DoT.