Leadership Strategies to Achieve Business Excellence-A Study of Selected Companies in India

Abstract

This paper is based on part of investigations carried out on ‘Factors determining excellence in business in selected listed Indian companies’. Business excellence is expressed in terms of the best practices followed by the organisations and also the quality of business performance outcomes. Leadership strategies and practices are one of the most important determinants of business excellence. A total of 30 important leadership strategies and actions followed by the successful organisations globally were identified. The responses were obtained from a sample of 75 top-performing Indian companies listed in stock markets. The sample frame was NSE500 companies. In all, 29 key business performance indicators (PIs) were also designed in eight areas of results. The responses were obtained from the companies on five-point Likert scale. The data were processed on SPSS and AMOS software packages to investigate the effect of the leadership inputs on the firm's performance. Factor analysis, correlation tests and median split t-test were conducted. It has been found that business excellence practices in leadership and strategies have strong influence on several business PIs. In path analysis, it was found that leadership practices influenced results directly or indirectly, through other business practices like operations structure and resources, operations strategies, etc. The processes and strategies identified can be very useful easy-to-use self-evaluation and monitoring tool for any commercial organisation to improve performance and competitiveness.