Leadership as a Quality Factor: What the Agency Head Achieves – Dr. Florian Bresler

What was measured

Leadership efficiency is one of the four enablers of the QMC model. What was measured was not the behavior of the agency head itself but how clients experience it. They rated three statements about the agency they had worked with, from 1 (poor performance) to 5 (top performance):

• The agency head enables and encourages employee participation.
• The agency head is characterized by charismatic behavior.
• The agency head identifies with the organization as a whole.

What the literature led us to expect

In the literature review the dissertation evaluated 31 empirical studies on quality factors; nine of them concern leadership. Leadership research provides the frame: the perception and values of top management shape decisions, and a democratic, employee-centered style differs from a boss-centered one. The empirical studies point in the same direction. Charismatic and people-oriented leadership promoted open communication, and the identification of managers with their company carried over to employees and improved success in customer contact. Several authors also point out that leadership is hard to measure because every judgment about superiors remains subjective. This is one reason why the dissertation asks about the clients' perception and not about leadership behavior itself.

Four traits of a quality-promoting agency head were derived. In the preliminary study with agency executives, communicative openness was dropped because it overlapped with participation. Democratic participation, charismatic behavior and identification with the organization remained.

What the survey shows

The 209 clients gave the leadership of their agency mostly good marks: participation 3.48, charisma 3.44 and identification 3.31 on average. For all three traits, 53 to 55 percent chose one of the two upper levels. What matters, however, is not the level of the marks but the weight in the structural equation model: in the final model, leadership efficiency reaches a standardized weight of 0.98 and lies far ahead of the two other enablers.

Within the factor the weight is distributed unevenly. The identification of the agency head with the organization received the lowest mean but shapes the factor most strongly in the final model (0.58), followed by participation (0.20) and charisma (0.16).

Why the agency head carries so much weight

The dissertation explains the finding with the role of the head in everyday agency life. Especially in smaller agencies, the head keeps the contact with the client, shapes the contracts and ensures a steady flow of assignments. Requests, approvals and complaints come together with them. They are the pivot at which every improvement of communication quality starts.

A second finding fits this: an agency's network of systems and partners showed no significant relationship with perceived quality. Clients evidently see an agency as a personal partner and trust a specific head.

Here the dissertation sees its contribution to the state of research. Earlier studies examined satisfaction, engagement or competence of employees without measuring how strongly their performance depends on the example set by the head. By its own account, the study quantifies the importance of the agency head for the first time in a survey, at least for the sample examined.

Conclusions for agency heads

As traits of successful agency heads, the dissertation names charisma, identification with the organization, personal commitment and a democratic style. Four tasks can be derived from this:

• Actually enable participation in the team, not just announce it.
• Live the identification with one's own agency visibly, including toward the client.
• Encourage conversation in the team, informally too, and allow new ideas.
• Learn from completed projects and feed the insights back into the next ones.

Three limitations belong to the figure of 0.98: the path from leadership to communication quality is a reference path and was not tested individually. Cross-relationships between the enablers are not modeled. And the values describe how clients experience agency heads, not how these actually lead.