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Keywords
Baldrige Award, Leadership, Modelling, Quality assessment
Abstract
In this study, a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) criteria-based survey was used to assess the quality status of organizations that employ quality professionals. The objective was to focus on the relationship between leadership (LS), information and analysis, human resource planning, process quality, and customer focus. The result was the development of an MBNQA-based model that demonstrated the relationship between executive LS and the MBNQA factors.
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Introduction
US organizations are using quality improvement techniques to produce higher quality products and services at significantly reduced costs. Studies (Tanner et al., 1995) show that the cost savings associated with quality improvements often occur early, within 3 years, in the long term quality management effort. Hence, actively managing quality is helping US organizations to become more competitive in the global market (Scheuermann et al., 1997).
Consistent with the application of quality improvement techniques is the assessment of quality and evaluation of the internal and external customers' perception of quality. In this study, a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) criteria-based survey was used to assess the quality status of organizations that employ quality professionals. An MBNQA-based survey, of American Society for Quality (ASQ) Dallas section, was conducted to measure the perceptions of quality among quality professionals and to measure the relationships among the MBNQA dimensions. Specifically, this work focuses on the relationship between leadership (LS), information and analysis (IA), human resource (HR) planning, process quality (PQ), and customer focus (CF). The sample selected for this study comprised of ASQ quality professionals. As a result of the expertise of the respondents, this data set provides an unique insight into the relationships among the dimensions that compose quality in an organization. Developing a measurement instrument is an important step in assessing the quality, or perception of quality, of an organization (Bemowski and Stratton, 1995; Black and Porter, 1996; Prybutok and Stafford, 1997). Hence, exploration of the relationships in the MBNQA as measured by the instrument we developed was the main objective of this work. Factor analysis and regression models were used to explore...