EMPLOYEE JOB ATTITUDES AND TQM: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN NATIONAL QUALITY AWARD WINNER COMPANIES IN SRI LANKA

Today Quality Management is seen as “Total Quality Management (TQM)”; a comprehensive approach to continually improving competitiveness effectiveness and flexibility through planning, organizing and understanding each activity and involving each individual at each level. Based on the review of literature the researcher found that there are limited research studies available on the concern for quality in Sri Lankan organizations. More specifically literature available identified a considerable research gap in the area of employee job attitudes as a variable which determines the excellence of TQM. According to Collard (1989, pp: 7 – 11). favorable attitudes of employees towards Job Satisfaction (JS), Job Involvement (JI) and Commitment are determinants of excellence of TQM of any organization. Accordingly the research question was “Do job attitudes of operational level employees have an impact on the excellence of TQM ?”.The study was done with the help of a Likert scaled questionnaire. The unit of analysis was ‘individual’. The questionnaire was proved valid since Chronbach’s Alpha values were above 0.65.The validity of the questionnaire was checked through a pilot survey. In this model each attitudinal variable was taken to be positively related to excellence of TQM. This study was limited to a sample of 180 employees of private sector national quality award winner (NQAW) companies. There were 15 NQAW companies till year 2004, which was the sampling frame of this study. The sample consists of 10% of the population. The sampling method was stratified random sampling and was stratified on the field of specialization (Production/Operations, Marketing, and Human Resources). Univariate, Bivariate and Multivariate analyses were performed to analyze the data. The empirical investigation reveals that that there are positive relations between employee job attitudes and the excellence of Total Quality Management. Therefore these findings have to be considered when creating an atmosphere for enhancing the excellence of Total Quality Management of organizations. Keywords: Employee Commitment, Employee Involvement, Job Attitudes, Job Satisfaction, Total Quality Management For full paper: fmscresearch@sjp.ac.l