A survey instrument for standardizing TQM modeling research

For over a decade, total quality management has been a principle focus of business managers and academic researchers alike. The myriad prescriptions and practices, all purporting to represent this management philosophy, have been implemented with varying degrees of success. Despite the significant failure rate of TQM programs, the successes, as indicated by Baldrige Award winners, support continued interest in TQM. The search for linkages between current descriptive models and proposed prescriptive models of TQM spawned our research, which, in turn, required creation of a survey instrument. This paper describes the initial sources and development of this instrument, the rigorous sequence of testing that it has been subjected to, and its application for current and future research. The successful achievement of key survey statistics suggests that this instrument can be used for TQM data collection with confidence by researchers elsewhere who will investigate other proposed models.