MIT Sloan Management Review

Corporate Strategy, Operations Management and Research

TQM’s Challenge to Management Theory and Practice

By Robert M. Grant, Rami Shani and R. Krishnan

January 15, 1994

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM) IS MORE THAN A FAD OR A BUZZWORD, ARGUE THE AUTHORS. IT IS EVEN MORE THAN A TECHNIQUE FOR CONTROLLING AND motivating employees. TQM is a challenge to conventional management techniques and to the theories that underlie them. Therefore it cannot simply be grafted onto existing management structures and systems. If its benefits are to be fully realized, then companies need to prepare themselves for organizationwide change — including top management’s relinquishing of power. Furthermore, TQM practices cannot be combined with strategic initiatives, such as corporate restructuring, that are based on conventional management theories. The failure of one or both programs is inevitable.

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The success stories of total quality management (TQM) are well known. They include such companies as Xerox, Allen-Bradley, Motorola, Marriott, Harley-Davidson, Ford, and Hewlett-Packard. These companies committed themselves wholeheartedly to TQM; they made fundamental changes in their management practices and philosophies and improved product quality and company performance.

But more often, companies that have tried to implement TQM have not achieved such dramatic benefits. They may have produced some tangible improvements in product and service quality, but the quality improvement programs ultimately fell apart. In many of these companies, the TQM programs lost momentum because disagreements over goals and implementation procedures surfaced, upper-level managers turned their attention to other priorities, and employees became increasingly skeptical about organizational commitment to the programs. In other companies, quality programs clashed resoundingly with other strategic initiatives.

Consider the case of Kodak. In 1983 and 1984, Kodak embarked on a companywide quality campaign in response to increased competition, high silver prices, and an overvalued dollar. The company’s “corporate policy quality statement” committed Kodak “to be world leader in the quality of its products and services. We will judge this quality by how well we anticipate and satisfy customer needs.”1 During the next few years, Kodak trained employees in statistical techniques, held annual worldwide quality conferences, involved top management in quality programs, disseminated reports of quality improvement experiences throughout... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

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