The quality of American products after decades of improvement has stopped progressing. Historical trends of traditional quality management fail to motivate workers and ensure quality production. A new way of addressing quality is ecessary. Innovative quality programmes provide a stimulus to...

In the past decade there has been a movement towards “employee empowerment”. Employee/management teams have played an integral part in this change. Recently, the idea of the self‐directed work group has emerged, giving groups of employees both the responsibility over a particular area or...