The influence of total quality management practices on the transformation of how organisations work

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of total quality management practices on the transformation of how organisations work, by conducting both a quantitative analysis with data collected from a survey of government employees and a content analysis with data collected from the same source using open-ended questions. This study investigated the differences between the total quality management participants and non-participants, and the pre-test and post-test, using five analytic lenses: understanding the total quality management philosophies, transforming individual attitudes, promoting knowledge of total quality management through collective learning, transforming management style toward system-oriented approaches, and transforming the existing culture into a new organisational culture. This study showed that the total quality management practices have let government employees change their attitudes at work from a rule-of-thumb estimate to a rational judgment style on the basis of analysis, their learning mechanism from individual to collective learning, their decision-making style from the individual-based to the team-based type.

Keywords:

• TQM
• innovation
• new public management
• empowerment
• business excellence
• attitudinal change
• organisational change
• performance in the public sector