Culture, Climate, and Total Quality Management: Measuring Readiness for Change

Abstract

Most managers are aware that successfully introducing a new way of operating into the culture of an organization often results in dissatisfied or distressed employees who may not buy into the new program. Staff resistance to the desired change is often excessive and immediate-a point that has led some researchers to suggest that it may be easier and less costly to start a completely new organization than it is to change an existing one (Thompson and Luthans, 1990). Adopting a TQM initiative in an organization is typical of such an effort to change the way an organization operates. Success requires extensive preparation and constant, total-staff commitment to the TQM philosophy TQM makes customer satisfaction the number-one company priority; emphasis is placed on meeting or exceeding external customer expectations in every transaction. TQM also emphasizes the importance of improving every work process to produce consistent, acceptable outputs (Tenner and DeToro, 1990) while encouraging and supporting teamwork by maintaining a satisfying work environment for all employees. The difficulty of changing an organization is exemplified by the many firms that seek to adopt TQM and fail. As a result, some organizations are questioning whether TQM is right for their operations, despite TQM's welldocumented successes. Researchers are increasingly reporting TQM failures, including firms that have won the Malcolm Baldrige Award. In these reports, problems in management are usually identified as the cause for the failure. We believe that most if not all of TQM adoption failures-and failures of other such change initiatives-are not failures of management. Rather, they may be attributed to deeper, more critical sources: the fundamental, pervasive culture of the organization and the operating climate that culture instills in its employees. Often, managers are victims of that culture, just as change itself is