Impact of Total Quality Management (TQM) on organizational performance in the United States: An empirical investigation of critical success factors

Total Quality Management (TQM) emerged as a key competitive strategy for business organizations in the global marketplace. TQM has become a new management paradigm in all types of organizations. In recent years, many organizations have demonstrated that significant improvements in business can be achieved through TQM. Several research works, however, have raised some issues in the implementation of TQM including the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Although the Baldrige Award criteria have become recognized as the best set of TQM standards, there is no evidence that the Baldrige criteria can be universally effective tools to measure TQM success for all types of industries. A major reason for this is that each organization has a unique set of ingredients for success. This empirical study extensively investigated the factors affecting successful implementation of TQM in three different industries--large manufacturing companies, small firms, and service organizations. The primary objectives of this study were: (1) to broaden the knowledge of TQM by assessing the perspectives of current management philosophy; (2) to provide a self-assessment framework for the successful implementation of TQM in different business types; and (3) to suggest several management techniques to help a firm become a world-class organization. A cross sectional field survey was conducted to answer the above questions. Multiple methods were utilized to provide a rich basis for interpreting and validating the findings. The results of the statistical analysis revealed several important findings. First, all hypothesized quality success variables were positively associated with TQM success. Second, the people-oriented factors are more highly associated with both TQM success and competitive advantages than technically-oriented factors. Third, this research revealed that two variables (information technology and management of process quality) have a multivariate interaction effect with industry type on the dependent variables (TQM success and competitive advantages). The study results also indicate that there is an interaction effect of these two independent variables on one of the dependent variables in terms of TQM success. The group differences of these variables on TQM success in service organizations were regarded as crucial compared to the manufacturing companies. These findings indicate that the Baldrige criteria should be established based on the industrial characteristics