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1. Introduction
Today, global competition has reached every part of the world and area of business (Brooke, 1994; Koberg et al., 2003). An effective model of success for companies is total quality management (TQM), which is a management philosophy and a set of management methods and tools aiming at providing superior value to customers through identification of their expressed and latent needs, although TQM emerged from manufacturing industry, it is being customer oriented and normally associated with the development, deployment and maintenance of organizational systems that are required for various business processes. TQM is a key strategy for maintaining competitive advantage and is a way of managing organizations to improve its overall effectiveness and performance toward achieving world class status (Zhang, 2000; Chapman and Al-Khawaldeh, 2002). A review of quality awards and critical success factors for TQM has shown that culture influences the understanding of TQM in a country and it also affects the operationalization of TQM in a country (Tan et al., 2003; Kumar, 2006). Changa et al. (2010) in their study shows that employee empowerment, employee compensation, teamwork and management leadership are significant positive predictors of employee satisfaction and employee loyalty can be enhanced through employee satisfaction.
On the other hand, with the increasing complexity, scope and organizational role of advanced manufacturing technologies, the maintenance of these technologies is becoming very critical to the ability of the organization to compete. In this context, operations management, especially maintenance management, is taking on a broader organizational strategic role. Due to the changing organizational role of maintenance and the increasing complexity of manufacturing technologies, maintenance-related costs have been on the increase (Parida and Kumar, 2006). In a survey of manufacturing organizations conducted by Cholasuke et al. (2004) only one-third of the organizations, with good maintenance management practices tended to realize the full benefits of their maintenance management initiatives.
Like quality, maintenance has been another shop floor issue of strategic importance. The realization of the need to focus on equipment maintenance to achieve quality has also brought total productive maintenance (TPM) into the corporate boardroom of many organizations, especially in the last decade. Nowadays, both TQM and TPM have acquired wide acceptance in industry (Singh, 1991; Bhadury and Mandal, 1998; Sahay et al., 2000),...