Leadership best practice for sustaining business excellence in innovative organisations.

Innovative organisations are facing exceptional changes and challenges. To meet such changes and challenges, it is recognised that appropriate leadership is essential. This leadership organises and encourages thoughts and good intentions by putting the interests of others as the top priority, energises positive thoughts; loyalty, integrity and determination, and facilitates creative thinking by using all creative methods to solve problems and think outside of the box. Leadership best practices are the basis and driver for "innovative organisations and excellence" across the world. However, achieving best practice is almost impossible without defining a common understanding of leadership and sustainable business excellence within organisations. For five decades, scholars almost failed to agree on one common definition. This has led to the need for new, agreeable leadership roles to ensure that organisational excellence is sustainable, innovative, and valid for all. The aims of this research include, firstly, to provide a framework for understanding leadership. Secondly, it aims to provide a methodology to build and validate "business excellence" and "leadership" models and theories. Thirdly, this research will develop a sustainable business excellence framework that integrates quality management and the majority of the necessary components for considering the performance of enterprises in today's environment, taking into consideration the creativity and sustaining excellence in innovation by organisations in this 21st century. The research methodology used in this thesis includes a literature review of approximately 1000 articles and definitions that were collected from different sources, interviews of carefully selected experts in the field of leadership and business excellence, and different sets of questionnaires. Moreover, a validation tool has been developed, which is a combination of well-known management tools (Deming Cycle, RADAR logic, and Structural Equational Modelling (SEM)). In addition, statistical software (SPSS) and AMOS have been used to carry out the necessary statistical analysis and to facilitate the development of the proposed leadership framework and validation model. There are four major new outcomes of this thesis: 1) developing a framework for understanding leadership, 2) developing the six essential elements of leadership, 3) developing a model to validate business excellence models, 4) developing a new leadership framework for the 21st Century that is characterised by innovative principles and sustainable business excellence within an organisation.