Quality and the Committed Worker

Abstract

Abstract Total quality management (TQM) has become a focus of interest for managers around the world in almost the full range of industrial sectors, from manufacturing to service, health care, education, and government. While the success of TQM in Japan has been widely documented, a McKinsey study in Europe and the United states found that two thirds of quality improvement programs have failed to show the expected results. The focus of this chapter will be to answer the following questions: why do quality improvement (QI) programs succeed in some cultures and fail in others, and how can managers across the world cope with the need to improve quality? If we apply our approach of cultural self-knowledge approach to answer these questions, we find that quality improvement pro grams sometimes fail because not enough attention is given to their meaning by the employees who implement them and not enough care is given to select implementation strategies appropriate to the given culture. In this chapter, we will define the role of self-knowledge for understanding the typical reaction people have to quality improvement programs. We also propose the 3-D model of QI, which consists of the implementation of QI on three levels (the individual, the group, and the organization) and adjusts the emphasis given to each level in line with cultural characteristics. Finally, we examine the potential success of QI throughout the world and suggest appropriate strategies for implementation of quality improvement programs in various cultures.