A Study of the Effects of Total Quality Management (TQM) Practices on Quality Achievements According to European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM)

This study aims at identifying the relationships between TQM practices and testing the effects of these practices on quality achievements and outcomes. The intended practices include: leadership, process management, human resources management and learning, quality planning, supplier management and customer focus; and the quality achievements include: customer outcomes, individual outcomes, society outcomes and quality performance. In this respect, the path analysis method was applied using the Lisrel software; and the research model was tested using the data collected from 303 manufacturing and service firms in Khuzestan Province (Iran) with ISO: 9000 standard. The findings indicate that among all the hypotheses formulated based on research objective, only the two hypotheses dealing with the links between human resources management and continuous improvement on one hand, and process management and continuous improvement on the other were rejected, supporting the remaining 17 hypotheses which speculated that TQM practices would have a positive effect on quality achievements.