The roles of learning and motivation in total quality management Essay

The roles of learning and motivation in total quality management - Essay Example widely acknowledged and practiced by successful organizations and firms on a world wide basis; the philosophy originates with the concept of continuous improvement but expands to a wide array of different processes to ensure that quality is the utmost objective of all organizational operations (Terziovski et al., 2000). In addition to that TQM highlights the critical issue of customer satisfaction as a benchmark for measuring, assessing, evaluating and achieving eventually high quality standards in the provision of both services and products. While Total Quality Management is considered a systematic approach to quality, the majority of researchers argue that it is more of a philosophical perspective and view of the organization rather than a practical implementation of systems and tools. According to Coyle-Shapiro (1999) the objective of TQM is to transform an organizational culture towards a culture of quality. Ambroz (2004) posits that the culture is the dominant issue in TQM and most importantly the culture becomes a key ‘ingredient’ for achieving successful TQM. Within the framework of culture two critical issues emerge; the learning orientation of the organization and the employees’ motivation and participation towards managing and continuously improving quality (Dimitriades, 2000; Wilkinson et al., 2003; Yeh, 2003). This paper discusses the role of the learning orientation and the motivation of employees towards this respect. Total Quality Management is the philosophy which places quality at the very top of every organizational operation or process. Adopting a TQM approach to managing quality fairly implies that the organization is transformed to a quality oriented organization; this further implies that the culture of organization is transformed towards a more quality-drive and quality-focus culture. This transformation is not only theoretical but it becomes practical too, when processes and procedures are redesigned or re-configured in order to