Reframing Quality Culture in Higher Education: Inclusive Leadership, Psychological Safety, and the Leadership–Safety–Quality Framework

Quality assurance in higher education has increasingly shifted from a focus on compliance toward the development of internal quality cultures that emphasize continuous improvement. Despite this shift, existing approaches continue to privilege formal systems and procedures, often overlooking the relational conditions through which quality is enacted in practice. This study addresses this gap by examining how leadership and organizational climate shape participation in quality processes. Adopting an integrative review approach, the paper synthesizes literature on inclusive leadership, psychological safety, and quality culture to develop a conceptual framework for understanding quality as a socially embedded phenomenon. The proposed Leadership–Safety–Quality (LSQ) Framework positions inclusive leadership as a generative condition, psychological safety as an enabling condition for participation, and quality culture as an emergent outcome of sustained interaction and engagement. The paper argues that the effectiveness of quality assurance systems depends not only on their structural design but also on the extent to which they foster environments in which individuals feel able to contribute, question, and reflect. By reframing quality assurance as a leadership-mediated and participatory process, the study offers a more nuanced account of how quality culture is enacted within institutions. The framework contributes to ongoing discussions on quality culture by integrating relational and structural perspectives and highlights the importance of leadership practices in enabling meaningful engagement with quality processes in higher education.