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Total Quality Management: Principles, Pioneers, and Implementation
Principles of Management · Chapter 15: Productivity and Quality ManagementSection 15.2 · lesson 102 of 11713 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Principles, pioneers, and implementation.
- State the 8 principles of Total Quality Management
- Describe the contributions of the quality pioneers
- Read common and special cause on a control chart
- Explain how TQM is implemented, and why it fails
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,690 words). Read along, or search it.
Productivity and Quality Management
Total Quality Management
Some management ideas are techniques. Total Quality Management claims to be something bigger. This section explains what TQM is, and why it can't be handed to a single department. We'll set out its eight principles, and what each one demands of a manager. We'll look closely at customer focus, and at process orientation, the philosophical core. We'll meet four pioneers, Shewhart, Juran, Crosby, and Deming, and read a control chart. Then we'll cover the tools, quality circles, and how implementation works. We'll see the four recurring reasons implementations fail, and what the evidence honestly shows. And we'll finish with a manager who fixed a process that was never broken.
TQM Defined
A Philosophy, Not a Toolkit
Total Quality Management, commonly abbreviated TQM, is a management philosophy, rather than a toolkit. It's a way of understanding how an organization should be run. It isn't a set of techniques, applied on top of an organization that otherwise stays unchanged. That definition has a direct consequence, worth stating plainly. TQM cannot be delegated to a quality department. A philosophy that governs how the whole organization operates can't be handed to one specialized unit. That unit can't implement it on everyone else's behalf. If TQM is treated that way, it has already stopped being TQM in any meaningful sense. And that's true regardless of what the delegated department happens to be called.
The 8 Principles
What Each Requires of a Manager
TQM rests on eight principles, and each one requires something specific of a manager. Customer focus means defining success by customer value, not internal convenience. Total employee involvement means drawing on every employee's knowledge of her own work, not only management's. Process orientation means examining the system that produced a result, rather than blaming the individual within it. An integrated system means treating quality as connected across functions, rather than siloed within one. A strategic and systematic approach means embedding quality into planning itself. Quality isn't a separate activity, bolted on afterward. Continual improvement means treating quality as an ongoing process, with no finished end state. Fact-based decision making means grounding decisions in actual data, rather than assumption or opinion. And communication means genuinely sharing information across the organization. It shouldn't be restricted to those who supposedly need to know. Read together, the eight describe how a whole organization runs. That's why TQM is a philosophy.
Table 15.2.1
When a Principle Is Missing
Table fifteen point two point one adds something practical. For each principle, the observable sign that it's absent. That matters, because organizations rarely announce that they've abandoned a principle. The signs give it away. Customer focus is missing when decisions are justified by internal ease, rather than customer benefit. Employee involvement is missing when frontline staff are never consulted about process problems. Process orientation is missing when recurring problems are answered with individual discipline alone. An integrated system is missing when departments optimize their own quality metrics, independent of each other. A strategic approach is missing when quality shows up only as separate, occasional projects. Continual improvement is missing when improvement efforts stop, once a target is first met. Fact-based decision making is missing when decisions rest on opinion or seniority, rather than evidence. And communication is missing when information is restricted to a narrow, need-to-know basis.
Customer Focus
Who Is the Customer?
Customer focus raises a genuine question. Who, exactly, is the customer? The internal customer concept extends the idea inward. The next step in a process, inside the organization, counts as a customer. For instance, the assembly stage is a customer of the fabrication stage that feeds it. This is useful, because it extends quality thinking to every internal handoff. Quality stops being something that matters only at the final external sale. But the limits are equally real. An internal customer's convenience can be prioritized in a way that drifts from what the external customer values. That happens when the concept is applied uncritically. The safeguard is to keep the real, paying customer's interest in view, at every handoff.
Process Orientation
The Philosophical Core
Process orientation is the philosophical core of TQM. It's the shift from blaming individuals for a poor result, to examining the systems that produced it. That shift is harder than it sounds, and the reason is psychological. It connects directly to the attribution perspective, from Subchapter ten point seven. An observer's default tendency is to over-attribute a poor outcome to the individual involved. At the same time, she under-attributes it to the surrounding process. That's exactly the fundamental attribution error that subchapter described. So process orientation isn't just a preference. It's a deliberate organizational discipline. It's built specifically to counteract that natural tendency. When something goes wrong, the first question becomes what in the system produced it, not who did it.
The Pioneers
4 Distinct Contributions
Several pioneers made documented, distinct contributions to the quality tradition TQM draws on. Walter Shewhart founded the statistical process control tradition. He distinguished two kinds of variation, and we'll look at them closely in a moment. Joseph Juran developed the quality trilogy. Planning, control, and improvement. He saw them as three interlocking managerial processes that quality requires. Juran also distinguished quality as freedom from deficiencies, from quality as fitness for use. That echoes, and predates, the multiple senses of quality from Subchapter fifteen point one. Philip Crosby developed the cost of quality argument, and a conformance framing of quality. That connects directly to the cost-of-quality framework from the same subchapter. And W. Edwards Deming is credited with broadening quality to the whole organization. Deming insisted that quality was a matter of management system, and of leadership responsibility. It was not a technical concern, isolated to production or inspection alone.
Figure 15.2.1
Common Cause and Special Cause
Shewhart's distinction is between two kinds of variation. Common cause variation is the natural variation inherent in any process. Special cause variation arises from an identifiable, specific source, outside the process's normal operation. A control chart makes the distinction visible. Figure fifteen point two point one shows one for a process at Harborline Manufacturing, with illustrative values. It plots a process measurement over time, around a center line. Above and below it sit an upper control limit, and a lower control limit. Thirteen points fall within the limits. That's ordinary common cause variation, calling for no reaction at all. One point breaches the upper limit. That's a genuine special cause signal. It calls for investigation of that specific instance. Now the crucial management implication. Responding to common cause variation as though it were special cause makes performance worse. Adjusting a process for ordinary, expected fluctuation adds a new source of variation, on top of the natural one. It doesn't correct anything that was genuinely wrong.
Method and Tools
PDCA, and Tools by Purpose
TQM's operating method is the plan, do, check, act cycle, introduced in Subchapter five point six. Plan a change. Then carry it out, on a small scale. Check whether it produced the intended result. Then act on what was learned, either adopting the change more broadly, or revising it. And then the cycle begins again. TQM's tools are best understood by purpose. There are four, each answering a different question. Data collection answers what is actually happening. It gathers the facts that fact-based decisions require. Pattern display uses Pareto analysis and run charts. It answers which few causes account for most of a problem, and how a measure behaves over time. Cause exploration uses cause-and-effect diagrams, to answer what might be producing an observed effect. It organizes potential causes systematically, rather than leaving them as an unstructured list. And prioritization answers which problem or cause is worth addressing first, given limited time and resources.
Making It Real
Quality Circles and Implementation
Quality circles and improvement teams bring total employee involvement into practice. They're standing, small-group structures, dedicated to solving quality problems in their own area of work. Their success depends on the conditions Subchapter eight point two identified for effective team building. Genuine management support, clear scope, and a diagnosed, targeted intervention. Implementation as a whole requires four things, working together. Leadership commitment must be genuine and visible, not merely a stated endorsement. Training must equip employees with the specific skills the principles and tools actually require. Measurement must make quality performance genuinely visible, rather than assumed. And a sustaining structure must keep the effort operating well beyond its initial rollout. That means standing processes, not a one-time launch event.
Why Implementations Fail
4 Failures, and the Honest Evidence
TQM implementations fail for four recurring reasons. The first is delegation to a department. It repeats the exact error this section opened with. The second is absence of measurement. Without it, an organization can't tell whether its quality effort is working. The third is no change in what's rewarded. Evaluation and pay may keep recognizing only the old priorities. Then the whole effort is undermined. The fourth is reversion under schedule pressure. The first serious deadline conflict arrives, and quality practices are the first thing set aside to hit the date. That reveals the organization's actual priority was never quality in the first place. So what does the evidence show? It deserves an honest statement, rather than a settled one. Genuine, sustained commitment across all eight principles shows documented improvement in quality outcomes. Often, it improves financial performance too. Partial implementation, or adoption mainly for marketing value, shows weaker or inconsistent results. In other words, the evidence tracks the depth of genuine implementation, not the adoption of the label.
Case Vignette
Adjusting a Process That Was Never Broken
Here's a composite case, constructed for instruction. Yuki managed a production process at Harborline Manufacturing, and reviewed her control chart weekly. One week, a single measurement moved slightly above the center line. It was still well within the upper and lower control limits. Yuki instructed her team to recalibrate the equipment. She believed she was catching a problem early. Over the following weeks, variation in the process increased. It was worse than before her adjustment. The recalibration had shifted a process that had never actually drifted out of its normal range. She had reacted to ordinary common cause variation as though it were a special cause signal. Yuki restored the original calibration and left the process alone. Performance returned to its earlier, more stable level. Her mistake was exactly the one Shewhart's distinction warns against. Her intervention had added a new source of variation to a process that hadn't needed correcting at all. Next, Subchapter fifteen point three turns to ISO nine thousand, a formal certification standard built on overlapping principles.
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