TQM

TQM

TQM

Total quality management (TQM) is an organizational activity that has received many labels since its widespread introduction to the American workplace in the early 1980s. It has been labeled as a comprehensive approach to management, a managerial philosophy, a set of tools for improving quality and customer focus, and an organizational development (OD) intervention that can affect both the business and the people side of operations. It is practiced by statisticians and engineers, psychologists and other behavioral scientists, and by CEOs, general managers, and HR professionals. Total quality management has been praised as the panacea for business competitiveness and survival, and it has been maligned as nothing more than a passing fad that has failed to deliver. Clearly, it is difficult to provide a comprehensive, unified definition of TQM that would inspire consensus from the wide range of academics, managers, and consultants who are invested in such a definition.

However, it is possible to identify the primary architects of TQM and to summarize the principles and assumptions that can be extracted from their work. It is widely agreed that the founders of TQM are W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, and Kaoru Ishikawa. The assumptions of their collective work have been summarized as follows: (a) Quality (of goods and services) is essential for organizational survival; (b) the key to quality is through people, who inherently want to contribute to quality and will do so when trained and supported; (c) because organizations are systems comprising interdependent parts, quality improvement efforts should focus on cross-functional processes; and (d) quality must be driven from the top, by senior managers who are committed to and responsible for quality. From these assumptions flow several important principles, including the use of structured problem solving, data-driven decision making, SPC (statistical process control) tools, and employee involvement and development. From this, the essence of TQM can be distilled as a top-down commitment to quality, achieved through employee involvement in continuous process improvement.

THE EVOLUTION OF TQM

The proliferation of quality and process improvement techniques and programs that preceded and followed TQM has resulted in confusion about what is and is not TQM. Predecessors include American-born quality of work life (QWL) interventions, the industrial-democracy movement in Europe, and the quality revolution in Japan, from which quality circles emerged. It is widely agreed that these quality improvement and employee involvement initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s provided the foundation on which TQM was built. A combination of factors converged in the late 1970s and early 1980s that would cause TQM to surpass all of these in its scope and impact. These included the quality crisis in American industry, unprecedented global competition, the demands of workers for involvement and empowerment, and the adaptation of quality principles for the nonmanufacturing sector.

The legitimacy of TQM was established in 1987 when Congress established the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA). This annual award recognizes quality excellence in business, health care, and education in the areas of strategic planning; leadership; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; ...