The Quality Culture Inventory: a comprehensive approach towards measuring quality culture in higher education

ABSTRACT

Quality assurance and quality development represent central challenges of higher education institutions (HEIs). In this context, the term quality culture has gained increasing attention. Quality culture refers to an organizational culture, which emphasizes the importance of continuous quality improvement, shared attitudes, and commitment towards quality. Despite growing discussion of quality culture, sound empirical approaches that capture this key construct have not been developed systematically. Therefore, we developed the ‘Quality Culture Inventory’ (QCI), which represents a comprehensive approach to operationalizing quality culture in HEIs. In a first step, this paper summarizes the development and empirical validation of the QCI, which comprises six dimensions (e.g. quality-oriented commitment, leadership, and communication). In a second step, relationships between the QCI dimensions and several potential outcome measures (e.g. job satisfaction) are reported. The QCI allows HEIs to evaluate their current state of quality culture based on empirical evidence and develop target-oriented recommendations for quality improvement.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality culture
• quality enhancement
• operationalization
• quantitative research
• higher education

Acknowledgments

The heiQUALITY Cultures Project was funded by the ‘Innovation and Quality Fund (IQF) of the Ministry of Sciences, Research and Arts Baden-Württemberg, Germany’ (Innovations- und Qualitätsfonds (IQF) des Ministeriums für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg, Deutschland). Term: 04/2012-05/2015.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg: [Grant Number AZ: 41-0421.915/15/68].