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Lisa D. McNary: Otterbein College, Grove City, Ohio, USA
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The author wishes to remember Dr W. Edwards Deming for his support and input on this research, before his death in December 1993. A special note of appreciation goes to the participants who took the time to co-operate and share in this research. This article was supported in part by a grant from the Student Resource Allocation Committee at the University of New Mexico, where the author was a doctoral student. Additionally, feedback on this research from the 48th Annual Quality Congress sponsored by the ASQC was most helpful.
"We are in a new economic age!" (Deming, 1986). This statement is the latest catch-phrase to describe the current high-tech, information-intensive, multi-cultural, global economy that is to carry the business world into the twenty-first century, and the defining characteristic of the new economic age is quality in products and services.
The quality movement is expected to affect the American worker in every aspect of life - economic, social, and political (PBS, 1991:Part I). Indeed, "quality" is considered the definitive 1990s corporate buzzword, but the quality movement is proving to be much more than a fad. Indeed, many experts consider the outcome of the "quality movement" the key to the USA's future progress or demise in economics (Bryce, 1992; Deming, 1986, 1990a, 1993; Eakins, 1992; Houghton, 1992; Neave, 1990; PBS, 1991).
The proclamation, by management theorist Dr W. Edwards Deming, that "We are in a new economic age!" has not gone unnoticed. At a minimum, quality management is becoming a necessity for organizational survival in the new economic age, for companies that have a reputation for high quality products or services will ride the capitalist economic cycle better than companies that do not. However, quality management can bring far more dramatic changes than mere survival through minor reconstruction or revision; indeed, quality management has the potential to create a much needed transformation of organizational USA.
The burgeoning field of quality management has yielded an impressive amount of research in a short period of time. One aspect of quality management that is routinely explored is the importance of managerial leadership which is actively involved in the quality management process. While a great deal of the literature on the...