Page 120 - text

SeCtion tWo Change approaches & management tools
TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM) Description
Also known as Continuous Quality improvement (CQI), TQM aims for wide-ranging employee involvement in continuous change process designed to exceed customer expectations of services.The focus is explicitly on processes, and management support is directed at providing employees with the necessary training and coaching required for them to undertake this work. Employees’ knowledge of change processes is increased, autonomy and decision-making responsibility given to front-line staff, and process improvements incentivised by linking rewards to performance improvements.
Originally implemented to boost the quality of post-war Japanese industry, the approach became popular in the west in the early 1990s during a period of economic downturn. Iles and Sutherland (2001) distil four underlying principles from the authors most closely associated with the approach:
• Success requires organisations to continuously meet the needs of internal and external customers;
• Quality results from the implantation of the connected tasks, processes and interaction – these may be understood and modified to yield higher quality;
• Most employees aspire to do a good job and this motivation may be supported , enhanced and harnessed to further improve processes; and
• Insights into the causes of variation in quality within processes may be made with the application of simple statistical methods if the data is reflective
117