Total Quality Management: A Selective Commentary on Its Human Dimensions, with Special Reference to Its Downside

Abstract

Total Quality Management (TQM) is bent on transforming the way organizations work. Many people, not just Al Gore, seem to think that this is a pretty good thing. These days one rarely picks up an academic review, professional journal, or trade publication without seeing commitment to quality lauded. Indeed, Christopher Pollitt (1993, 180) observes that the basic elements of the New Public Management, the international public administration fad of the nineties (Mintzberg, 1996), are a constant rhetorical emphasis on the need to Improve service quality and an equally relentless emphasis on customer satisfaction. To explore the implications of TQM, my school recently sponsored a series of workshop/seminars on the subject. I was asked to take part, and my assignment was to lead a discussion of the so-called human side of TQM. In particular, my charge was to discuss what a constant rhetorical emphasis on the need to improve service quality means for the people who do the work of organizations and what it does to them. Discussions of statistical process control procedures, plan/do/check/act cycles, implementation issues and the like, were left to other workshop sessions. I approached this assignment neither as a committed believer, of which there are many in the academic and administrative worlds, nor as an antagonist., Rather, I wanted to find out what this--what to call it? philosophy, school of thought, administrative approach, set of procedures?--has to offer on the people side. In any event, this assignment gave me the opportunity to think more seriously than I had before about the subject. This article is the result of that thinking. Its purpose is to offer a commentary on the people side of the quality movement, and it is composed of three parts: a look backward, in the form of a brief and selective review of the quality movement; a look inward, particularly with observations about its downside; and a look forward, which comprises a concluding admonition and reminder. Certainly I am not the first to offer a critical look at the movement. Others have noted that TQM can be hard to implement (Harari, 1992; Radin and Coffee, 1993; Schneider, Brief, and Guzzo, 1996, 15), or suggested that its orthodox form is inappropriate to public-sector organizations (Swiss, 1992), or denied that it is comparable with the cultural realities of public administration (Rago, 1994; Kim, 1995). However, it has rarely been observed that TQM might be costly to the organization and its members, let alone that there might be situations where successful implementation of TQM could do more harm than good. Looking Backward: A Brief Review of Quality The quality movement has one core idea: goods and services must achieve the highest attainable quality; nothing less will do. Hence, the past decade or so has seen the rise of a philosophy aimed at maximizing organizational quality (see, for example, Carr and Littman, 1993; Cohen and Brand, 1993; Berman and West, 1995; and Mani, 1995). Understanding the quality movement means that we must first understand the implications of maximizing organizational quality and its assumptions. What Maximizing Organizational Quality Means The quality concept has been around at least as long as Taylorism, which championed the attaining of quality through inspection (Taylor, 1911; Knouse, Carson, and Carson, 1993). Burns (1994), for example, argues that Robert Owens New Lanark mills operated between 1799 and 1825 under principles highly similar to W. Edwards Deming's (1982; 1986) 14-point prescription (Table 1). Indeed, one can find the origins of the quality movement's most recent manifestation in the last gasps of classic public administration's generic management movement (Juran, 1944; Shewhart and Deming, 1945). Table 1. W Edwards Deming's 14 Points 1. Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service. …