19.

Does Total Quality Management lead to empowerment or increasing

bureaucratisation and tighter control? Use examples to support your answer.

1) What is Total Quality Management(TQM)?

Total Quality Management (TQM) looks like being one of the management
fashions of the 1990s. It is a management strategy aimed at embedding
awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used
in manufacturing, education, government, and service industries. Total Quality
provides an umbrella under which everyone in the organization can strive and
create customer satisfaction.

2) Elements of Total Quality Management(TQM).

A way of life for an organization as a whole committed to total customer
satisfaction through a continuous process of improvement and the
contribution and involvement of people.

a) Customer Orientation: Aim of all employees is to satisfy customers,

Customers may be internal or external.

b) Process Orientation: Horizontal linking of all activities in a quality chain,

reflection of systems theory.

c) Continuous Improvement: Kaizen through incremental changes,

improvements stem from front line employees

3) The major premise of TQM is that quality, defined by Feigenbaum as

“fitness for use”, is the key to business success in the 1990s and that this
rather than price or delivery, is the key to competitive advantage. The
traditional approach to the management of quality concentrates on the
production process. In contrast, TQM involves a primary focus on the
requirements of the customer; whether external or internal to the
organization.
4) TQM appears to have both “hard” and “soft” aspects.
“Hard” TQM: involve a range of production techniques, including statistical
process control, changes in the layout, design processes and procedures of
the organization, Just-In-Time inventory control and, most importantly, the
seven basic TQM tools used to interpret data: process flow charting, tally
charts, Pareto analysis, scatter diagrams, histograms, control charts and
cause and effect analysis.
“Soft” TQM: it is largely concerned with creating customer awareness within
an organization and, as such, may be seen as a form of internal marketing. It
focus on team working, encourage employee’s involvement and participation.

5) The Controversy over JIT/ TQM.

  Managerial Perspective: Empower Employees, Raise Standards,
Develop Co-operation.
 Critical Perspective: Reduce Employee Freedom, Intensify work
Pressure, Exploit Dependent Firms, Labour intensification, Increased
Control.
 Flexibility , Quality, Team work

For example: The Japan’s cars, videos, TVs mass production, The quality and
specification that make them so competitive come from refinements and
extensions to the assembly line. The Japanese are the “modern masters” of
standardization and Taylorism. Similarly, there is nothing in practices like
teamworking and multi-skilling that necessarily enhances work, it depends
entirely on how they are applied, how they are implemented. Work in these
plants has certain “attractive qualities’, employees often take a pride in the
production operation and in being part of an elite workforce. However, the other
side of the coin is the “ unlimited performance demands, long woking hours and
requirements to work overtime on short notice, recurrent health and safety
complaints, and the rigorous factory regime.