Strategic and Quality Management

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RESPONSE:

1. What are five key elements of quality management?

This depends on the definition of quality that one holds. According to Padhi (2008), for example, there are eight key elements of total quality management (TQM). He compares the eight elements to an analogy of building a house (e.g., laying a solid foundation, adding the building blocks, the bonding mortar, and finally the roof of recognition). Perhaps, you might focus on the last five, since this question asks for five elements.

Foundation:
1. Ethics
2. Integrity
3. Trust

Building Blocks:
4. Training
5. Teamwork
6. Leadership

Roof:
7. Recognition

Binding Mortar:
8. Communication

From this perspective, TQM is built on a foundation of ethics, integrity and trust. It fosters openness, fairness and sincerity and allows involvement by everyone. Total quality management is only successful when implemented under the umbrella of these key foundation elements of quality:

1. Ethics - Ethics is the discipline concerned with good and bad in any situation. It is a two-faceted subject represented by organizational and individual ethics. Organizational ethics establish a business code of ethics that outlines guidelines that all employees are to adhere to in the performance of their work. Individual ethics include personal rights or wrongs.

2. Integrity - Integrity implies honesty, morals, values, fairness, and adherence to the facts and sincerity. The characteristic is what customers (internal or external) expect and deserve to receive. People see the opposite of integrity as duplicity. TQM will not work in an atmosphere of duplicity.

3. Trust - Trust is a by-product of integrity and ethical conduct. Without trust, the framework of TQM cannot be built. Trust fosters full participation of all members. It allows empowerment that encourages pride ownership and it encourages commitment. It allows decision making at appropriate levels in the organization, fosters individual risk-taking for continuous improvement and helps to ensure that measurements focus on improvement of process and are not used to contend people. Trust is essential to ensure customer satisfaction. So, trust builds the ...