تاثیر سیستم های مدیریت کیفیت بر عملکرد شرکت Impact of quality management systems on firm performance

1. Introduction Quality management (QM) has been an integral part of the overall organizational movement for the past few decades to achieve world-class product/service quality and market success (Hayes and Pisano, 1996; Ward and Duray, 2000; Voss, 2005; Datta and Roy, 2011). There have been a series of QM principles/practices/approaches/systems in use over the years, including Total Quality Management (TQM), Continuous Improvement (CI), Six Sigma, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Toyota Production System (TPS), Lean Manufacturing, Theory of Constraints (TOC), and ISO 9001 QM System standards. Organizations worldwide have also adopted various business/quality excellence assessment models to demonstrate a high level of commitment to quality achievement. Since 1951, Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers have been giving the Annual Deming Prize/Deming Grand Prize (named after the US quality expert W. Edwards Deming) to companies that have achieved distinctive performance improvements through the application of TQM. In 1987, the US Government started its own annual award program, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), for excellence in quality achievement for the US-based companies. This was followed by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), in 1991, launching the European Quality Award to recognize companies showing a high level of commitment to quality. Most of the organizations in other countries, worldwide, have also adopted similar or customized business excellence assessment models to demonstrate and achieve quality and business performance achievement. All these QM systems as well as business assessment models have been evolved by many quality experts at different countries/institutions at different point of time over the last few decades with the fundamental purpose of achieving quality and business performance excellence. However, organizations worldwide have adopted/implemented either a particular QM system or a combination of these QM systems to meet their company objectives including improvement in their business/organizational performance. Further, there are also organizations which have adopted multiple systems, either together or in different sequences, and have reported different levels of performance achievements. Large number of such research have been conducted in last two decades at various organizations showing the impact of adoption of several QM systems on the organization’s quality, operating and business performances. In this context, a descriptive literature review was published by Ahire et al. (1995) providing a thorough synthesis of 226 TQM-related articles published in 44 management journals from 1970 to 1993 and categorizing the literature among the several components of QM. Alvarez et al. (2000) also published a literature review of 201 TQM-related articles from 28 leading journals over the years 1994 to 1999 and categorized them according to a framework for providing an understanding of what constitutes QM research and the direction of research in this area.