Product quality alignment and business unit performance

Abstract

Over the past decade, new strategic approaches to the management of product quality have become prime drivers of product and process innovation and change in many firms. However, many firm's product quality improvement efforts have failed to deliver anticipated business performance benefits. Implementation problems are generally viewed as significant factors in explaining such failures. Further, the literature suggests that firms' views of product quality are often very different from those of their customers. However, to date this issue has received little empirical attention. The objective of this research was to examine the causes and performance outcomes of product quality alignment ‐ differences between firms' views of the product quality they deliver and customer views of the product quality delivered to them. We conducted exploratory interviews with quality and marketing managers aimed at developing a grounded understanding of the nature, antecedents and consequences of product quality alignment. These fieldwork insights were combined with the existing literature to delineate the central product quality alignment construct and develop specific hypotheses concerning the antecedents and performance consequences of product quality alignment at the SBU‐level. Using data from a mail survey of multiple key informants (general managers, quality managers and marketing managers), we tested hypothesized relationships using a structural equation model methodology. Our quantitative findings provide empirical evidence that product quality alignment positively affects business unit performance. Our data also suggest that the degree to which quality goals spanning customer‐focused and internally‐oriented criteria influence decision‐making and actions taken is positively associated with product quality alignment. Further, our data indicate that while the use of marketing tools in developing and executing product quality improvement efforts is positively associated with product quality alignment, no such association is observed with more commonly recommended TQM tools. Our results also suggest that effective interfunctlonal interactions between quality and marketing functions (higher levels of interfunctional connectedness and lower levels of interfunctional conflict) are positively associated with product quality alignment. Overall, our results suggest that product quality alignment is an important concept in understanding product quality improvement‐performance linkages at the SBU level and that minimizing mis‐alignment may be an appropriate focus for management attention.