Total Quality Management (TQM), is a management philosophy that gained its momentum in the 1980's. W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, and Kaoru Ishikawa are the founders who set forth the fundamentals of TQM. In a matter of a short time TQM turned into a social movement and gained a significant level of acceptance in the U.S management community (Hackman &Wageman, 1995).
The primary authorities of the TQM movement are of the opinion that being in business is the main objective of any organization. This in turn helps in the stability of the community and provides a platform for the growth and satisfaction of the organization members (Hackman &Wageman, 1995). Consequently, one can say that TQM refers to a management process that involves everyone and all the activities in an organization to ensure that the customer requirements are met at the same time the goals of the organization are satisfied and helps in the self-improvement of employees.
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Nameless and NumberlessTQM has radically changed the way in which quality traditionally was handled. A comparison and contrast of the two approaches highlights the advantages of TQM over the traditional style. Typically, quality was defined internally in an organization. Products or services were assumed to be of good quality if the organization thought so. But according to TQM customer satisfaction is the primary criteria to define quality. It was believed that poor quality was a result of poor and inefficient work exhibited by the workers but TQM attributes the quality assurance to the management and not the workers alone. Apart from team building TQM stresses on the principle that the efficiency of cross-functional teams increases quality. This is in contrast with the traditional thought of building teams and concentrating on a high amount of efficient teamwork. Inspection was a common method used earlier to...