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Total quality management (TQM) is a part of the total quality assurance perspective. This system, which is considered as a type of managerial philosophy, employs all organizational levels to constantly ameliorate the quality of goods and service. The purpose of this paper is to measure the effect of hard and soft TQM factors on the behavior of customers based on the role of innovation and continuous improvement.

The research model was extracted from TQM variables in hard and soft parts, customer behavior, innovation and continuous improvement by reviewing the literature and research background. Based on this, a questionnaire was prepared and then, distributed among the statistical population including 374 project managers, quality assurance managers as well as quality control managers by using simple random sampling. All sub-criteria of questionnaire were determined using Delphi technique, to test the research model. Having gathered the questionnaire, the hypotheses were analyzed by using structural equation modeling and AMOS software.

According to the statistical analyses, TQM has a significant effect on customer behavior through continuous improvement of the quality and innovation. Also, regarding the obtained results, the highest effect was related to the effect of hard TQM factors on customer behavior through innovation as 0.62. Furtheremore, TQM soft factors such as human resource management have significant effect on customer behavior through quality improvement and innovation. Moreover, TQM hard factors are effective on customer behavior through quality improvement and innovation.

The questionnaire was designed and distributed in order to evaluate the hypotheses in this study. One of the primary rationales behind utilizing this method instead of other methods such as interview was high geographical distribution of organizations. Using other moderator variables such as knowledge management, customer knowledge management and customer emotions can be conducted in the future in this area.

Changing the organizational relationships from task orientation to the process orientation, and controlling the organizational performance by measuring process innovations and improvements, while paying attention to the customer satisfaction system are suggested in this paper. These implications should be implemented in construction projects by department of project management office. Furtheremore, providing different communication for receiving the opinions of the customer and imposing them in the product and service, paying attention to the response system and customer complaint, implementation of this process in the organization, and having a process approach for presenting and developing services are the main subjects in this regard.

Unlike previous studies on this subject, a structural equation model is used for assessing unobservable latent constructs and their related interrelationship in measuring the impact of TQM factors. Focusing on customer behavior which is a broader domain than customer satisfation through continuous improvement of the quality and innovation is another value of this research.

The principal aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between technological, marketing, organizational and commercialization risk management on new product development (NPD) performance.

Based on questionnaire, the data were collected from a sample of general automotive industry in Iran. Based on theoretical considerations, a model was proposed and descriptive statistic and hierarchical regression were used to measure the relationship between risk management factors and NPD performance.

Data analysis revealed that if organization can amplify their knowledge and information about risk and main factors that affect NPD process, not only can they do their work better but can also increase their ability to predict future happenings that affect performance.

First, due to the relatively small sample size, caution should be exercised when interpreting the results. Second, the data were collected from automotive producer in Iran, which may restrict to some extent generalizability of the findings.

The results suggest that managers should consider more attention to risk management. If managers spread the risk management in all aspects of the NPD project, total performance will be increased and it can develop the probability of NPD success. Also organizations should perform great market research due to best commercialization.

Past researches have presented complete information about NPD process. But identifying and considering the effect of the risk management parameters that are connected to the NPD process were the main thrusts to perform the study. In this paper, based on past research about risk management of NPD, the extra aspect of process that can improve total performance of NPD has been examined.