In this thesis, we investigate the dissipative transport phenomena of strongly interacting matter. The special interest is in the shear viscosity and its value divided by entropy density. The performed calculations are based on effective models for Quantum Chromodynamics, mostly focused on the 2-flavor Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. This allows us to study the hadronic sector as well as the quark sector within one single model. We expand the models up to next-to-leading order in inverse numbers of colors. We present different possibilities of calculating linear transport coefficients and give an overview over qualitative properties as well as over recent ideas concerning ideal fluids. As present methods are not able to calculate the quark two-point function in Minkowski space-time in the self-consistent approximation scheme of the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, a new method for this purpose is developed. This self-energy parametrization method is applied to the expansion scheme, yielding the quark spectral function with meson back-coupling effects. The usage of this spectral function in the transport calculation is only one result of this work. We also test the application of different transport approaches in the NJL model, and find an interesting behavior of the shear viscosity at the critical end point of the phase diagram. We also use the NJL model to calculate the viscosity of a pion gas in the dilute regime. After an analysis of other models for pions and their interaction, we find that the NJL-result leads to an important modification of transport properties in comparison with the calculations which purely rely on pion properties in the vacuum.