Internalizing a Culture of Business Excellence ― Perspectives from Quality Professionals

Underline by the importance of sustainable quality management practices to contemporary organizations, this edited book complies best practice cases of leaders who have initiated and facilitated quality practices in their organizations. The cases highlight how these best practices manifested in their work cultures, values, and beliefs. Not only do they address organizational efforts towards implementation of quality practices but they also discuss the challenges the leaders faced to instill a sense of quality in practices across the hierarchical structures of their organizations. At the end of each case, the authors provide questions to facilitate interesting and thought-provoking discussions, to teach key quality concepts, and to apply relevant theoretical frameworks.

In today’s business world, as transnational companies face the dual challenges of managing global knowledge networks and multicultural project teams, as well as interacting and collaborating across boundaries using global communication technologies, it is crucial to have quality management programs in place that fit into these multinational environments. Although quality management may be viewed as both a catalyst and driver for change, research has also clearly indicated that national culture is highly resistant to change due to diverse mind-sets, chaotic emotional challenges, and varying behavioural norms and patterns. As well, although quality practices can be easily changed, the fundamental values that underlie those practices are very difficult to transform. Such a phenomenon would suggest a strong need for global firms to adapt their quality practices to the local national culture. As a consequence, organizational cultures of globalized firms need to be aligned to the divergent values rooted in the national cultures of the local leaders and workforce. Accomplishing this cultural integration should not compromise the integrity of world-wide quality management policies, rather efforts towards program development should be geared toward strategies that can be most effectively implemented in the local culture, as well as the organizational culture. Thus, organizational leaders are increasingly in need of quality management approaches that result in sustainable business results.

Dr Flevy Lasrado is assistant professor of quality management at University of Wollongong in Dubai UAE. She carries 15+ years of work experience in academia. During her academic years, she has been recognized for outstanding contribution for research and for outstanding performance at her work. She has won several internal and external research and travel grants. Specifically, the grants are from UOWD, British council UK and UK innovation and science group. With a plethora of experience in both academia and industry, Dr Flevy Lasrado has extensive knowledge of quality assurance and institutional effectiveness. Her research interests revolve around Quality Management in a range of organisational settings. In additional to this, Dr Lasrado carriers extensive experience in implementing quality management system and is a qualified EFQM assessor and lead auditor for ISO 9008:2014. She also serves an assessor for national quality award namely Dubai Quality award. She teaches Quality Management, Business Excellence and Business process improvement courses to graduate students at UOWD. Dr Lasrado is a professional speaker at various forums including the British Council’s Global Higher Education Dialogues in Sri Lanka, the UK and the UAE, World Quality Congress, Leadership Congress in the UAE, OLC Forum and Ideas Arabia, UAE. In June 2014, she also became a recipient of the Leadership Quality Award from the World Quality Congress in Mumbai. Dr Lasrado currently has more than 30 publications that include journal articles, conference papers and book chapters. Her current research interest includes Green Management, Business Excellence, innovation management and sustainable development

Dr. Zakaria holds a PhD in Information Science and Technology and a MPhil of Information Transfer from Syracuse University, USA; an MS in Management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, USA; and a BBA in Human Resources Management from University Utara Malaysia. She is Associate Professor on the Faculty of Business and Management at the University of Wollongong in Dubai (UOWD), where she teaches courses in responsible leadership, intercultural applications for socially innovative business, and managerial concepts and skills. Her educational training bridges the interdisciplinary fields of cross-cultural management, international human resource management, international business, and computer-mediated communication technology. Her research program aims at exploring how and why cultural values shape people in terms of decision-making, negotiation, communication styles, leadership, and management practices. Her new research involves compiling cross-cultural tool kits for human resources training of global virtual teams. Her most recent book, "Culture Matters: Decision Making of Global Virtual Teams" is published by CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group in 2017. She is currently engaged in another book project, "Culturally-Oriented Challenges for Self-Initiated Expatriates (SIEs) in Multinational Organizations: Emerging Research and Opportunities", which is expected to be published by IGI Global in late 2017. For over a decade, she has collaborated with global scholars from the United States, Japan, Malaysia, and Canada. She is currently working with a South African scholar to understand cultural identity in the workplace from Muslim women’s perspective. She has secured numerous international grants as Principal Investigator from the Asian Office of Aerospace Research Development as well as Co-Investigator from research grants such as the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Sciences, the Nippon Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Some of her high-impact publications, indexed by ERA, ISI and Scopus, include: Academy of Management and Learning Education, International Journal of Manpower, IT & People, The Database