Total quality management and sustainable competitive advantage: serial mediation of transformational leadership and executive ability

Abstract

Improving performance through better processes should be the focus of quality professionals. Based on the IPO (Input-Process-Output) model, this study considers total quality management (TQM) as an input of the internal and external of an organisation and transformational leadership (TL) and executive ability (EA) as the mechanism (Process) to promote and coordinate internal–external elements for the organisation obtaining its sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) (Output). Taking samples in the southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan city for the questionnaire survey in this study, a total of 252 valid responses are collected and analysed to discuss the relationships among TQM, TL, EA and SCA. Reliability analysis, validity analysis, CFA and SEM are utilised for the analyses. The research findings are summarised as follows: (1) TQM significantly affects TL, EA and SCA. (2) TL and EA significantly affect a firm’s SCA and each of them has the mediating effect between TQM and SCA. (3) Both of them have a serial mediating effect on the relationship between TQM and SCA. Implications, limitations and future research directions are discussed.