Quality Definition and the Different Perspectives
People define quality based on their viewpoint and expectations. Quality is well understood from the viewpoint of product or service users on the basis of different perspectives. Shin (2017, p. 998) noted that quality is a term given to any product or service by a person after getting satisfied. Transcendent-based perspectives represent a situation where a person is not sure of the color of a product but gets interested after seeing the items. Quality typifies a prospect where consumers purchase items because of particular features. The other perspective is user-based, and involves consumers defining a quality product as one that matches their personal use. Consumers also classify quality in terms of value and product affordability.
The Principles of Quality Management
There are about eight principles of quality management that companies need to adapt to ensure success. Mukhopadhyay (2020, p. 21) identified the eight major principles of total quality management that affect the performance of businesses. The first principle is about customer focus, which emphasizes that companies can hardly exist without consumers. Accordingly, businesses should strive to understand the present and future customers in a bid to meet their needs. The next principle of total quality management is leadership. A leader of any organization should be strong, purposeful, and able to unite people to create a productive and progressive business environment. The third principle emphasizes the need for people involvement, underlining that a business cannot survive a balanced, skilled team. Process approach is another important principle of management that helps businesses in avoiding confusion over the appropriate ways to complete tasks. Continual improvement, the sixth principle, focuses on the need to promote improvements to remain competitive. Next, a factual approach to decision-making is a principle of quality management that facilitates the formulation of effective decisions based on data.
Perceived Service Quality and Its Implications
Perceived service quality defines the customersâ appraisal of general excellence or superiority of the service. Typically, perceived service quality is considered as the attitude associated with but not corresponding to satisfaction resulting from comparison of anticipated service levels with recognized performance. At the time of consumption experience, customers observe real service performance. Thereafter, the consumers evaluate how well the real performance results in the perceived quality.
In the current business environment, the perceived service quality has the ability to generate considerable competitive advantage by being an influential differentiating factor. In a business environment, customers view quality of products differently. In cases where clients are not satisfied, they may identify the quality of service as poor and make a decision to seek the same service from another company. Essentially, successful organizations apply the knowledge of perceived service quality as a strategic weapon for developing quality in the services they offer.
Service Total Commitment in the Hospitality Industry
Service is the level of assistance offered by employees to facilitate the purchase by the clients. In the hospitality industry, success require the organization to commit to ensuring customer satisfaction. Cheng and Chen (2017, p. 2677) noted that a commitment in service play an essential role in the hospitality industry. Accordingly, the sector emphasizes on service total commitment that involves a raft of efforts the organizations make to accomplish pleasant customer experience for visitors.
The Service Encounter Triad in the Hospitality Industry
Service encounters involve transactional interactions where people such as travel agents offer a service or goods, for example airline tickets to others. In service encounter triad, the service depicts the relationships between the three parties involved and indicates probable sources of conflicts (Tuan, 2018, p. 136). The three parties engaged are often service organizations, contact personnel, and customers. For example, in the hospitality industry, service triad is when the interaction between a hotel, consumer service personnel, and the customer are part of the offered services such as bed and breakfast.
Total Quality Management (TQM) and How Is It Structured
Total quality management is an administrative approach that lays emphasis on long-term success by making customers satisfied. In a TQM approach, all members of a company are needed to participate in enhancing processes, products, services, as well as culture in which they work (Goharshenasan and Shahin, 2017, p. 113). The involvement of all the relevant groups leads to an effective implementation of TQM approaches, an implication that collaboration is not an option for success.
Total quality management consists of eight major elements: teamwork, ethics, training, trust, integrity, recognition, leadership, and communication. TQM is built on the center of trust, integrity, and ethics. These structures foster fairness and openness to allow contribution of everyone. Ethics help in the recognition of good and bad in an organization. Integrity helps a firm to stick to facts and sincerity, while trust allows full participation of all stakeholders. On the basis of a strong foundation, an organization progress through established measures such as training, teamwork, and leadership. Training equips workers with interpersonal skills and ability to be productive. The use of teams makes a company receive quicker and improved solutions to problems. Leadership is the most important element as it helps in inspiring the companyâs vision, as well as making strategic directions that members commit to in achieving success.
Communication acts as a binding mortar as it ties everything together. It is a vital link between departments which enables workers to understand ideas and decisions. The success of TQM requires communication with and between all business members. Recognition is the final element in the whole TQM system, and is essential for both suggestions and accomplishments for individuals and teams. Recognizing contributors is valuable for managers as it leads to changes in productivity, self-esteem, quality, as well as the amount of effort applied on the task assigned.
The whole structure is essential in promoting the success of TQM in organizations. The manager plays an essential role in developing the structures in the workplace. Without the TQM components, the entities of an organization cannot attain success. Simply put, TQM without involving ethics, integrity, and trust is an incomplete one. Additionally, without training, an organization would not have knowledge about TQM implementation. Lack of communication between managers, departments, and employees creates a burden on the entire system.
The Four Pâs in TQM
Total quality management relies on the four Pâs to influence on the operation of the firm. Performance, one of the Pâs could be achieved through efficient planning, managing people, and the processes that apply. Hence, the four Ps in TQM are performance, planning, people, and processes (Mukhopadhyay, 2020, p. 19). Significantly, these four Pâs are the major factors that influence the delivery of quality products, as well as services to customers. Planning usually covers the development along with the deployment of strategies or policies to ensure the inception of suitable partnerships and resources to design quality. Establishment of performance allows an organization to carry out self-assessment, reviews, audits, and benchmarking to improve quality. Processes permit the understanding of the management structure to warrant the designing or redesigning of quality management system for continuous improvement. Regarding people, the organization should ensure proper management of the human resources and culture change through communication, learning, and innovations.
Integrating TQM into the Policy and Strategy of the Organization
It is easier to integrate total quality management into policy and strategy of organizations. The process of total quality management could be achieved by creating an integrated system that is process-centered, has total worker involvement, and is fully customer focused (Andreeva et al., 2019, p. 4). The organization would be creating a customer focused culture and utilize data that supports its efforts as the clients are the most essential component of a business. Therefore, an organization should begin by clarifying vision, mission, and its core values to make employees know that what is done is tied to the businessâ strategy, objectives, and policy. Next, it is essential to identify the critical success factors, including financial performance, market share, customer satisfaction, and process improvement to help in meeting the planned objectives. After determining the critical success factors, an organization needs to develop measures and metrics to help in tracking the data of the recognized elements.
Identification of customer group is the next important step within TQM. All organizations have customers and those that understand their clients would create products and services based on the needs of the consumers. After distinguishing the customers, it is essential to solicit their feedbacks to help the organization know how well they are meeting consumersâ needs. To that end, companies could create a structured process of requesting for feedbacks from all consumers in an effort to recognize what is essential to them. After surveying all the customer groups, the organizations need to develop an improvement plan based on the obtained data. The plan, strategies, or policies should be structured in line with the companyâs goals. After completing an improvement plan, the organization could incorporate satisfaction data into marketing strategies combined with the existing technologies to achieve positive outcomes.
SRC and Ethics in Companies and My Position in That Respect
The social responsibility committee and ethics play an essential role in business management. Companies, both private and public, feel the need for incorporating ethical standards and social responsibilities in their organizational culture. In firms, ethics deal with recognizing what is right and wrong. Company ethics encompasses the analysis of decisions by the social responsibility committee to ensure beliefs and actions are in line with the business processes. Organizations are expected to display ethical values and operate in a socially responsible manner (Eberhardt-Toth, 2017, p. 1927). The primary concern is that companiesâ ethics incorporate different sets of standards. The issue leads to the reason why companies must employ morally upright people as staff. The ethics and wider social values reflect the duties of a company to the entire society.
Considering my views, all companies should operate in an ethical and socially responsible way for owners to realize some benefits. The decisions made by some owners need to reflect on the potential impacts on others. For example, customers require quality products that are also affordable. At the same time, other investors expect fair business engagement for the company. Consumers or citizens need to be aware of the fact that right things are done for good reasons as most companiesâ target residents in their strategies for making profits. Therefore, it is a condition that customers observe the conducts of companies to facilitate the creation of the right decision. Lastly, recognizing social and ethical norms helps customers to keep the company in tandem with the expectations of the society.
The 14 Principles of Deming
Creation of Constant Purpose toward Improvement
Deming requires the creation of constant purpose towards improvement in a company. In this case, managers should consider planning for quality that is long term and resist reacting with solutions that are short term. Significantly, managers should not apply a single approach for a long time. Instead, they should focus on finding new tactics through innovation while working in the company (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1163). Essentially, managers should possess the ability to prepare for future challenges, as well as aim at making change or improving.
Adopt the New Philosophy
In Deming, it is essential for managers to adopt new philosophies to embrace quality across the organization. Customerâs needs should always be the first priority instead of reacting to pressure from competition (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1163). This goal could be achieved through designing of products and services that meet the needs of the customers. By prioritizing customersâ quality needs, a firm can gain competitive advantage as the products become differentiated in a way that every client is satisfied.
Stop Depending on Inspections
Deming emphasizes that inspections are expensive and unreliable as they do not enhance quality but merely find a lack of it. In this case, managers are required to build quality into the companiesâ processes from the start to end (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1163). As they work to achieve the goal, managers should not focus on what they did wrong but instead work to eliminate the negative acts.
Use a Single Supplier for Any One Item
Consistency is a critical factor of consideration in total quality management. The principle of using a single supply for any one item underscores that the less variation maintained in the input, the reduced is the disparity in the output (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1164). Consistency allows the mastering of a strategy and the associated challenges. Eventually, it leads to the formulation of superior solutions for increased productivity and customer satisfaction.
Improve Constantly and Forever
This principle requires managers to work on ensuring constant improvement that is long-term. Deming necessitates the use of strategies that follow planning, doing, checking, and acting to promote analysis and improvement (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1164). To achieve such, managers need to emphasize on training and education to improve workersâ performance. Therefore, every organization should consider the principle of constant improvement by allowing employees to be trained in a way that they can help to increase the companyâs productivity.
Application of Training on the Job
Managers should not just leave employees to work on their own but facilitate them through training to equip knowledge for undertaking various tasks. Training enhances consistencies to help reduce variation and make needed change (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1164). Managers need to act by motivating staff to learn from each other and support a culture, as well as environment for effective teamwork. The hands-on experience acquired from on-the-job training is pivotal in enhancing the workersâ productivity.
Implementation of Leadership
This principle requires managers and supervisors to understand their employees, as well as the processes they apply. Leaders should not simply supervise but also offer support and resources to facilitate high performance among workers (Agrawal, p. 1164). Managers are expected to identify what each employee requires to increase their work efficiency. The leadership approach adopted should be the one that motivates the followers to commit to the companyâs purpose.
Elimination of Fear
This principle guides managers to allow workers to build a culture of trust by eliminating their fear to express concerns or ideas. Every employee should be supported to achieve the goal of the company by emphasizing on work ethics (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1165). Hence, managers need to make employees feel valued and motivate them to look for innovative ways of performing tasks. Confrontations that would instill fear among workers should be avoided.
Break down Barriers between Departments
These principles require managers to build the concept of internal customer relation that recognizes each department and the services they offer to each other towards achieving a defined output. Therefore, leaders should promote shared vision and allow employees to collaborate to nurture the spirit of teamwork and avert unhealthy relationships (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1165). On that note, leaders need to lay emphasis on cooperation and agreements and prevent compromise.
Get Rid of Unclear Slogans
People, particularly the customers, should know exactly what the company wants. Managers should not make people guess, for example, a slogan such as âSuccess is achievableâ could not show the real picture of what the company mean (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1165). A good slogan should give a clear picture of how a goal is achieved. For example, a slogan such as âThrough hard work, success is achievableâ is a clear one. The first slogan only informs the client that success is achievable but it does not explain how. The second slogan is complete as the clients is made aware that success could only be attained through hard work.
Eliminate Management by Objectives
This principle inspires managers to look at how every process is conducted in the company and avoid just focusing on numerical or quantitative aspects of production. According to Deming, production targets usually encourage high quantity and low quality (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1166). However, the best approach is where managers commit to supporting production processes to ensure high quality and achievability. While quantity is also important, quality is an inevitable production component that builds customersâ loyalty on products.
Removing Barriers to Pride of Workmanship
Barriers to pride occur when managers compare or rate the employees. All workers should be allowed to perform their tasks with pride and without open comparison and/or confrontation. Deming emphasizes that all workers should be treated the same to avoid harmful competition among them (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1166). Equal treatment of workers encourages every member to feel a sense of belonging and commit to the companiesâ production.
Implement Education and Self-empowerment
Deming considers the importance of improving the current skills of employees. This principle requires managers to encourage staff to learn new skills in preparation for upcoming changes, as well as challenges (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1166). Improved skills lead to effective production because resourceful human personnel are involved. Moreover, the work environment faces constant evolution, highlighting the need for workersâ learning to keep up-to-date with the latest changes.
Make âTransformationâ Everyoneâs Job
This principle of Deming focuses on improving the overall organization by encouraging every employee to observe quality standards. Managers should work on analyzing every workerâs actions and ensure they align well with the set goals and mission (Agrawal, 2019, p. 1166). Eventually, companies utilize effective approaches in accomplishing their desired objectives. With transformations reported in every task completed, firms can guarantee their clients high-quality products and services and become more competitive.
Reference List
Agrawal, N.M. (2019) âModeling Demingâs quality principles to improve performance using interpretive structural modeling and MICMAC analysisâ, International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, 36(7), pp. 1159-1180
Andreeva, T. et al. (2019) âIntegration of the quality management and strategic management systems into unified management system of enterprisesâ, Calitatea, 20(171), pp. 3-8.
Cheng, J.C. and Chen, C.Y. (2017) âJob resourcefulness, work engagement and prosocial service behaviors in the hospitality industryâ, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 29(10), pp. 2668-2687.
Eberhardt-Toth, E. (2017) âWho should be on a board corporate social responsibility committee?â, Journal of Cleaner Production, 140, pp. 1926-1935.
Goharshenasan, A. and Shahin, A. (2017) âPrioritization of quality management principles based on critical success factors of TQM using integrated approach of MCDM and IPA-the case of Marjan Tile Companyâ, International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 21(1), pp. 112-128.
Mukhopadhyay, M. (2020) Total quality management in education. California: SAGE Publications Limited.
Shin, D.H. (2017) âConceptualizing and measuring quality of experience of the internet of things: Exploring how quality is perceived by usersâ, Information and Management, 54(8), pp. 998-1011.
Tuan, L.T. (2018) âDriving employees to serve customers beyond their roles in the Vietnamese hospitality industry: The roles of paternalistic leadership and discretionary HR practicesâ, Tourism Management, 69, pp. 132-144.