Why Total Quality Management Programs Do Not Persist: The Role of Management Quality and Implications for Leading a TQM Transformation*

TLDR

Top‑down TQM initiatives frequently fail to produce lasting change, becoming fads that are quickly replaced, largely because the gap between senior management’s rhetoric and actual implementation varies across subunits and depends on management quality. The study aims to show that TQM will endure only when top management enforces an honest, firm‑wide dialogue that reveals subunit management quality and prompts improvement or replacement. The authors define management quality as senior leaders’ ability to build commitment, establish cross‑functional mechanisms, foster leadership skills and team culture, and create an open‑dialogue climate that supports TQM implementation.

Abstract

ABSTRACT Top‐down total quality management (TQM) programs often fail to create deep and sustained change in organizations. They become a fad soon replaced by another fad. Failure to institutionalize TQM can be attributed to a gap between top management's rhetoric about their intentions for TQM and the reality of implementation in various subunits of the organization. The gap varies from subunit to subunit due to the quality of management in each. By quality of management is meant the capacity of senior team to (1) develop commitment to the new TQM direction and behave and make decisions that are consistent with it, (2) develop the cross‐functional mechanisms, leadership skills, and team culture needed for TQM implementation, and (3) create a climate of open dialogues about progress in the TQM transformation that will enable learning and further change. The TQM transformations will persist only if top management requires and ultimately institutionalizes an honest organizational‐wide conversation that surfaces valid data about the quality of management in each subunit of the firm and leads to changes in management quality or replacement of managers.