Search results

This article discusses the importance of training and education for TQM. The best way to institute quality into an organisation, particularly a bank, is to train employees to do their job better. The training structure must be top‐down, starting with the top team and cascading down the organisation. This is necessary to show management commitment and to ensure managers actually understand the TQM principles and methods. Results of the research project have indicated that none of the respondents’ organisations possess a well‐developed TQM training strategy and plan.

To design a quality improvement oriented training and education programme (Q_TEPS) for a company manufacturing milk products and to explore its performance using a financial accounting system.

A company manufacturing milk products was visited and the processes were studied. The literature on Q_TEPS was referred to design Q_TEPS unique to the milk product manufacturing company. The feasibility of implementing Q_TEPS in the company was checked by interviewing the executives. A financial accounting system was used to evolve the income and expenditure account and the balance sheet pertaining to Q_TEPS in the company. The feedback collected using questionnaires was used to establish the validity of Q_TEPS and their financial accounting system in the company.

The implementation of Q_TEPS in the milk manufacturing company would enable the company to reap a considerable number of tangible and intangible benefits.

It being a government run company, test implementing Q_TEPS was not possible. The income and expenditure account and balance sheet were developed by projecting the performance of Q_TEPS in the company. However, this exercise was done with the consultation of the executives in the company and hence the values projected in the above statements may not deviate considerably from the real time performance of Q_TEPS.

The feedback on Q_TEPS and their financial accounting system led to an impression that they can be implemented in practice. However, in order to enable this, the business procedures must be made simple, flexible and friendly to experiment such research programmes in the future.

The literature review indicates that no work has been done on implementing Q_TEPS in a milk product producing company. Also, it is discernable that the performance of Q_TEPS has not been viewed using financial values. The contribution of this paper would lead to the attainment of these research and practical imperatives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between total quality management (TQM) practices and quality performance in Indian service companies.

The empirical data was collected using a self‐administered instrument that was distributed to 600 Indian service companies. Of the 600 instrument e‐mailed, 172 usable instrument were returned, yielding a response rate of 28.6 per cent. A stratified sampling procedure was utilized to obtain the minimum sample size of 600 from the four chosen service industries (i.e. Healthcare, Banking, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and Hospitality). The data was analyzed using factor, Pearson's correlation, and multiple regression analyses.

The findings revealed that TQM practices were found to be partially correlated with quality performance of the Indian service companies. It was also found that quality culture was perceived as the dominant TQM practice in quality performance. The other practices such as quality systems, training and education, teamwork, and benchmarking showed a positive relationship with quality performance.

The research paper was limited by including only four industries in the selection of service companies in India, making this a possibly biased selection and it may not be adequate to generalize the results for the entire Indian service companies.

The study has contributed to the TQM literature with a better understanding of the 17 TQM practices and their association with a company's quality performance that will provide valuable knowledge to top‐management of service companies, to refine their current TQM practices and subsequently improve quality performance.

The purpose of this paper is to look at human resource management (HRM) as a key element in the implementation of total quality management (TQM). This paper empirically tests the HRM practices that best fit this philosophy.

The results of an empirical study of 706 companies are analyzed using structural equation methodology. The practices that are used to construct the framework for analysing approaches to HRM are based on a literature review.

The results show that the alignment of the orientation towards quality and the approach to HRM is statistically significant for the utilization of the HRM system. The results also support the hypothesis that both TQM and HRM practices have a positive effect on performance.

A cross‐sectional analysis is applied, so it is necessary to be cautious in conclusions regarding causality. Single informants are used as the source of information. Although the use of single informants remains the primary research design in most studies, multiple informants would enhance the validity of the research findings.

Practitioners must bear in mind the fundamental role of human resource management in the pursuit of long‐term total quality management. Companies should look for a set of HRM practices congruent with TQM, rather than using individual practices. A strategic perspective to HRM supports these results.

There is little empirical evidence to support the effect that HRM can have on TQM implementation and most papers focus only on distinct HRM practices. This paper provides an insight into the issues involved in the development of HRM practices oriented to TQM. It examines the relationships among HRM practices, TQM and organizational performance.

There has been a plethora of published research related to total quality management (TQM) in the last few decades. However, very few studies focused on cataloging critical factors of TQM. One of the objectives of this literature review was to investigate the state of TQM by examining and listing various TQM factors identified based on survey studies conducted in different countries and published in a variety of journals over the past decade. An examination of 76 survey studies that used an integrated approach to TQM showed that the TQM factors could be grouped under 25 categories. An analysis of the 347 survey based research articles published between 1989 and 2000 using these 25 factors as a framework revealed the most frequently covered TQM factors in the literature. Another goal of the paper was to analyse the objectives of these articles by year and type of journal they were published in to determine the trends in TQM survey based studies and recommend future direction for research. The analysis showed that the objectives of the 347 studies could be grouped under six categories.

The objective of the chapter is to provide an integrative appraisal of recent participatory research projects with children on violence and maltreatment conducted by members of the COST Action CA 19106 working group on children's participation (WG3) and their colleagues to identify what is working well and what needs to change in future research. The evaluation of research examples clustered around four key questions: Why, when, how and how much do children participate in research? Data were collected using a unified tool designed to characterise participatory research, which was distributed among WG3 members. In addition, chapters of the current book were another source of data about participatory research. Overall, data on 19 studies involving 46,761 children were collected and analysed using Shier's matrix. Findings show that most studies (n = 10) engaged children as consultants to adults in data collection, whereas a few studies (n = 5) demonstrated a more children-led research approach. The analysis uncovered specific areas where more progress is required, including engaging children in decisions about the research topic, involving young children, utilising methods that are more natural and familiar to children, and gaining children's reflective accounts about their participation experience. The authors encourage scholars to publish their work to advance evidence-based knowledge and skills in participatory research with children about sensitive topics.

In scholarly publications, citations play an essential epistemic role in creating and disseminating knowledge. Conversely, the use of problematic citations impedes the growth of knowledge, contaminates the knowledge base and disserves science. This study investigates the presence of problematic citations in the works of business ethics scholars.

The authors investigated two types of problematic citations: inaccurate citations and plagiarized citations. For this, 1,200 randomly selected citations from three leading business ethics journals were assessed based on: (1) referenced journal errors, (2) article title errors and (3) author name errors. Other papers that replicated the same title errors were identified.

Of the citations in the examined business ethics journals, 21.42% have at least one error. Of particular concern are the citation errors in article titles, where 3.75% of examined citations have minor errors and another 3.75% display major errors – 7.5% in total. Two-thirds of minor and major title errors were repeatedly replicated in previous and ensuing publications, which confirms the presence of citation plagiarism. An average article published in a business ethics journal contains at least three plagiarized citations. Even though business ethics fares well compared to other disciplines, a situation where every fifth citation is problematic is unacceptable.

Business ethics scholars are not immune to the use of problematic citations, and it is unlikely that attempting to improve researchers' awareness of the unethicality of this behavior will bring a desirable outcome.

Identifying that problematic citations exist in the business ethics literature is novel because it is expected that these researchers would not condone this practice.

This chapter reflects on the use of interviews as a method of data collection with children and presents an innovative tool to encourage children and youth to express their views and opinions about different areas of their life, especially their experiences in foster care. The innovative tool presented is a gamified interview called ‘Play&Talk: The Magic Cards of Foster Care’. The interview progresses through three levels based on the complexity of the topic to be discussed, and the children or young people decide which topics to discuss and in what order to discuss them. Seventeen children in nonkinship foster care participated for the first time in the Play&Talk interviews in a research context. Based on this experience, this chapter discusses ethical issues relevant to promoting children's expression and fully realising their right to be heard and express their opinions. The age of the children (6–11 and 12–17 years old) was considered in design and data collection. It conditioned how children received the research information, how they completed informed consent, the use of language, the selection of questions and feedback regarding the results. In addition, the chapter discusses how to involve children and youth in research and their relationship with researchers. This research tool is an example of how to offer children a more participatory role in research interviews and illustrates the importance of age-appropriate designs.