The impact of TQM on financial performance

The question of whether an adoption of total quality management (TQM) improves the financial performance has been discussed for several years. Various studies have been conducted to examine the impact of TQM on financial performance, but there is still disagreement concerning the effectiveness of TQM. This paper presents a study of Swedish quality award recipients, which are compared to branch indices and to identified competitors. The comparison concerns the development of different financial performance indicators. The study indicates that the award recipients as a group outperform the branch index and their identified competitors on most of the studied indicators.