Content area
Full Text
The total quality management (TQM) movement is taking hold in the public and private sectors throughout the United States. This ubiquitous approach is now found in all types of organizations, including manufacturing, government, service industries, research and development, and education.
Why is this attention to quality taking place across so broad a spectrum? The simple, but accurate, answer is competition. In the global economy of today, the quality of many American products and services does not always compare favourably with that of our foreign counterparts. Building quality organizations has become the response of many American institutions.
As research on TQM programmes accumulates, it becomes clear that the manner in which these programmes are implemented has a great deal to do with whether they add to or subtract from organization productivity. There have been several obvious failures in recent months of companies which had invested heavily in TQM. One, Florida Power and Light Company, which had won the prestigious Deming Award, has recently questioned the overall value added by initiating TQM. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, reporting on a major study conducted jointly by the American Productivity Association and Ernst and Young, American companies which had initiated quality programmes were reported as successful in only one third of the cases! Furthermore, in 1991, the American Electronic Association (AEA) surveyed 300 electronics companies. Seventy-three per cent of the companies reported having a TQM programme under way, but of these, 63 per cent had failed to improve quality defects by even as much as 10 per cent. Obviously, simply putting a, TQM programme into effect does not guarantee that institutions or companies will be any more competitive than if they had not put one into effect.
From the research, and from our own experiment with TQM at the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory (SSCL) near Dallas, Texas, we have tried to sort out the ingredients and, in some cases, the combination of ingredients it takes to make TQM work. We have been building a TQM programme here for over one year now, and have learned some lessons on what works and what does not.
MODEL
In his book, Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance, Gilbert[1] provides a model for organizational productivity. The major reasons why people...