Total Quality Management's need for governance and leadership.

Abstract

This paper examines Total Quality Management’s (TQM) longstanding claim that governance and leadership are essential to its success, analysing this assumption through the lens of Critical Systems Thinking (CST). Although TQM is founded on principles of organisational cybernetics and is supported by models such as EFQM, high global failure rates suggest that existing frameworks insufficiently address how governance and leadership should operate in practice. Drawing on CST, the paper considers whether the Viable System Model (VSM) and Critical Systems Leadership (CSL) can together provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for effective TQM. The analysis is grounded in an action research case in which researchers attempted to create a TQM-like environment to support event management. The case illustrates how centralised leadership and top-down governance structures, inspired by VSM and CSL, ultimately proved fragile, as the project collapsed when key academic actors withdrew. This outcome demonstrates how TQM’s purported need for governance and leadership can become fictional when these functions depend excessively on individuals rather than distributed structures. The paper concludes that TQM requires governance aligned with existing organisational commitments and leadership that is distributed, adaptive and cultivated from the bottom up.