Date of Conferral

2021

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Management

Advisor

Daphne Halkias

Abstract

Compromising on the quality in the automotive manufacturing industry due to a quality manager’s poor team-building skills may sometimes cause financial loss and consumer deaths. A gap exists in the engineering and management literature on guidelines that quality managers in the automotive industry can apply to build team cohesiveness among quality engineers and production teams. The overarching research question in this study addressed the perceptions of quality managers who had successfully created team cohesion within quality engineering teams. The conceptual framework was founded on the concepts of leaders, followers, team cohesion, trust, and commitment and was grounded in leader-member exchange and followership theories that emphasize the importance of commitment and communication among managers and their teams. Utilizing a single case study with embedded units design, data were collected from semistructured interviews with seven quality managers from the automotive industry, archival data, and reflective journaling notes. Thematic analysis of the data revealed 15 themes within five coding categories: (a) becoming a competent quality manager, (b) challenges of leading quality engineer teams in the automotive industry, (c) building team trust with quality engineers, (d) building team commitment with quality engineers, and (e) leadership to create team cohesion. Investigating how to build team cohesion among quality engineers may contribute to positive social change by lending a voice to managers who influence positive organizational dynamics and may raise the level of quality and safety in automotive products.

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