The Role of Leadership in Promoting a Quality Assurance Culture in Educational Institutions: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Quality assurance (QA) now sits at the heart of how educational institutions raise teaching standards and strengthen their effectiveness rather than serving as a peripheral administrative duty. However, whether a QA system produces real change depends largely on how it is led. This paper presents a systematic review, conducted in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 statement, of how different leadership approaches shape, sustain, or undermine a culture that authentically supports quality assurance, with particular attention to staff engagement, psychological safety, continuous improvement, and the staff-wellbeing costs of QA implementation that leadership fails to buffer. Following a systematic search, a screening process, and a citation verification step described in Section 3, 41 independently verified studies were retained for synthesis. Across this body of work, transformational, distributed, and relationally enacted leadership emerges as the approach most likely to produce an authentic quality culture rather than a merely performative one. When leaders make quality visible, encourage collaboration across units, keep feedback loops working, and invest in staff capacity, commitment tends to be stronger and improvement more durable. Leadership that relies on compliance and control alone tends to produce the opposite outcomes: ritual compliance, administrative fatigue, and, in several of the studies reviewed, measurable staff burnout. The review concludes by drawing these findings into a conceptual framework and a set of practical recommendations for institutional leaders, policymakers, and leadership-preparation programs.