Assessing managers' awareness of TQM

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to analyze the rationale and the development of a measure that can be used in assessing managerial awareness and understanding of the concept of total quality management (TQM) within organizations. Design/methodology/approach – A total of nine “soft” concepts of TQM were identified among the leading literature in quality management. The awareness of each one of these items was investigated among nearly 400 managers. The quantitative evidence was further analyzed by factor analysis and reliability tests. Findings – The statistical analysis provided a distinctive and consistent, statistical measurement of the “soft” side of TQM. This measure consists of three items: continuous improvement and training, total employee empowerment and involvement and quality driven culture, which represent the whole concept of TQM approach. Research limitations/implications – The separate measurement of the “soft” side of TQM can result in a loss of information. It can be argued, however, that this measure can offer information of possibly different facets of a single phenomenon such as TQM. Originality/value – Whilst, the technical (“hard”) aspects of TQM are well documented and clearly measured, there is a general disagreement of what exactly composes the philosophical (“soft”) side of TQM. This disagreement provokes a major methodological problem with TQM being associated with the statistical measurement of its principles and concepts, which synthesize its whole theory. Thus, this study analyzes the method, which was used to develop a potential quantitative measure of the “soft” side of TQM that could be adopted in assessing managers' awareness of it.