T
Total Quality Management
Patria de Lancer Julnes
Penn State Harrisburg, Middletown, PA, USA
Synonyms
Quality management; Total quality control
Definition
TQM is an organization-wide, integrative effort to
continuously improve the quality of an organiza-
tion’s products or services and fully satisfy the
needs and wants of their customers/clients.
Introduction
Total quality management (TQM) has a long but
spotty history, filled with false starts and great
achievements that can be traced back to the Amer-
ican factories of the early 1900s. The emergence
of mass production and concomitant need for
standardization and cutting waste drove factories
to emulate laboratories testing the scientific
approach to improve productivity and efficiency.
This era saw the emergence of both Frederick
Taylor’s brand of scientific management and qual-
ity control (QC), the forerunner of TQ-
M. However, unlike scientific management, the
# Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
A. Farazmand (ed.), Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_1872-1
QC approach concepts and techniques received
only sporadic attention in the United States
(USA). QC figured prominently in the USA at
the height of military production during World
War II but then declined. It was in post-World
War II Japan that QC was first widely
implemented.
QC remained underdeveloped in the USA not
evolving into TQM due in part to lack of involve-
ment of management. The perception was that
ensuring quality products was the exclusive
responsibility of quality control departments
with heavy emphasis on statistical controls
(Deming 1982; Feigenbaum 1951). It wasn’t
until the 1980s, with more than 20 years of accu-
mulated success in the Japanese industry and fear
that the Japanese would overtake American indus-
try, that a more management-based version of
quality control, TQM, gained a broader audience
in the USA. The most prominent figures in the
history of QC, and subsequently TQM, are in the
USA, Walter A. Shewhart, W. Edwards Deming,
Joseph Juran, and Armand Feigenbaum and in
Japan, Kaoru Ishikawa.
In the public sector, the implementation of
TQM coincides with the rise of the New Public
Management (NPM) movement in the 1980s.
This movement emphasized private sector
approaches to increase government performance.
What Is TQM?
The term TQM is believed to have been first
introduced by Armand Feigenbaum in 1983.
2 Total Quality Management
This modern-day version of quality control efforts
is now understood as a process and a philosophy
for ensuring the quality of an organization’s prod-
ucts and services and can be characterized as
follows:
Total: implies that everyone, every department,
and every function in the organization are
involved and focused on improving the quality
of all the organization’s activities.
Quality: implies conforming to and exceeding all
requirements. These requirements are set by
the customers, who are the ultimate judges of
quality.
Management: implies that achieving total quality
does not happen by accident. Instead, it
requires deliberate and continuous efforts at
all stages of the production process and is led
by management.
What follows describes the evolution of TQM
from its QC foundation to modern times. This
evolution is presented in chronological order and
shows the major actors, events, concepts, and
ideas that led to this management philosophy.
From Quality Control to Total Quality
Management
Foundation: Quality Control 1900–1940
TQM was born out of the application of statistical
quality control systems (QC), including control
charts and the quality circle, developed by
Dr. Walter A. Shewhart. He was a statistician,
physicist, and engineer who started his work in
1918 at the Western Electric Company’s Haw-
thorne plant in Cicero, Illinois, and remained
there until 1927 when he went to Bell
Laboratories.
Shewhart recognized that the quality of a prod-
uct is inherently attached to the value that the
consumer gives to the product and so is based on
the characteristics of the product that consumers
perceive as important. Accordingly, these percep-
tions should guide organizations to standardize
their products and maintain the standards of
quality toward which they would strive. For
Shewhart and those who followed, statistical con-
trol methods, including measurement and sam-
pling as well and the isolation of causes of
variability, can help industry ensure quality,
improve productivity, and reduce cost. This initial
application of statistical methods to address these
issues in industry is marked by Shewhart’s intro-
duction of the quality control chart in 1924, which
allows for the plotting of data to study how a
process changes over time in relation to
preestablished tolerance limits of variation. The
use of the quality control chart also sealed the
importance of data in quality management – for
analysis, prediction, presentation of results, and
decision-making.
In his book Economic Control of Quality of
Manufactured Product, first published in 1931,
Shewhart laid the foundation for defining quality,
the scientific basis for controlling quality, the eco-
nomic advantage of controlling quality, and the
application of statistical methods for achieving
quality control and, ultimately, achieving cus-
tomer satisfaction. Shewhart believed that
through the application of statistical methods to
routine systems of production, industry could ful-
fill its purpose of meeting human wants in an
economical way. Key to this was the need to
minimize variability of the products by setting
up quality control thresholds at every stage of
the production process, from start to finish. This
would then reduce the cost of product fluctuation,
inspection, and rejection.
In 1939 Shewhart introduced the three steps of
control – specification, production, and inspection
or “judgement of quality,” which he believed
represented “a dynamic scientific process of
acquiring knowledge” (Shewhart 1939, p. 45).
These steps came to be known as the Shewhart
cycle and later popularized as the Deming cycle in
Japan (Deming 1986).
Further, Shewhart was an important influence
on both W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran
and often collaborated with Deming. Both
Deming and Juran worked at the Hawthorne
plant. Remarkably, this was the same plant
where the scientific management studies that led
to the Human Relation School were conducted.
Total Quality Management 3

The use of statistical methods for quality con- required during the war for cruisers, aircraft
trol continued to develop and disseminate through fighters, vessels, and submarines (Watson 2005;
the 1930s as manufacturing became more com- Schenectady Public Library 2015). Through his
plex, increasing the need for skilled individuals to work here, Feigenbaum expanded and further
perform quality inspections and to learn to mini- refined the QC concepts to develop what he
mize variation throughout the production system. came to call total quality control (TQC), described
Looking back, history shows Deming playing an below.
important role in the dissemination of statistical
methods training. While he was in charge of math
Post World War II: Total Quality Control
and statistics courses at the graduate school of the
and Reconstruction in Japan
US Department of Agriculture, he invited some of
A 1950s version of QC methods with a more
the luminaries of statistics to give lectures. One of
holistic approach, closely mirroring some of the
these was Shewhart, who was interested in mak-
characteristics of modern TQM, was total quality
ing statistical control techniques accessible to
control, TQC, a system-engineering approach
workers and focused his training on the practical
introduced by Armand Feigenbaum in his 1951
use of statistics in the production process.
book Quality Control: Principles, Practice and
Administration. The TQC approach was later
Quality Control During World War II (the
refined and elaborated in the Feigenbaum (1961,
1940s)
1983) republication of this book with the title
The ideas about quality improvement were elab-
Total Quality Control. Feigenbaum (1951) intro-
orated and received a tremendous boost during
duced a set of 37 principles for establishing qual-
World War II when American manufacturing per-
ity control programs based on “experiences with
sonnel received training on the use of statistical
total quality control” (p. 1). The first principle was
methods to improve the quality of military prod-
a definition of TQC as “an effective system for
ucts and processes. Both the training in these
integrating the quality-development, quality-
methods and the war figure prominently in the
maintenance, and quality improvement efforts of
evolution toward TQM. Key actors during the
the various groups in an organization so as to
1940s included the War Production Board whose
enable production and service at the most eco-
work focused on promoting and supporting train-
nomical levels which allow for full customer sat-
ing to American industries and Deming, who was
isfaction” (1951, p. 1). Watson (2005)
among those who provided the training.
summarizes the basic tenets of Feigenbaum’s
Also during this time, after leaving Western
approach to quality as follows:
Electric Company, Joseph Juran, another propo-
nent of the use of statistical controls, joined the
• Quality is an organization-wide process.
government’s Land Lease Administration. In this
• Quality is what the customer says it is.
capacity he improved the efficiency of processes
• Quality and cost are a sum, not a difference.
so that oversea allies could receive supplies in a
• Quality requires both individual and teamwork
timely manner. Others also focused on promulgat-
zealotry.
ing statistical controls including Ellis Ott, Harold
• Quality is a way of managing.
Dodge, Harry Romig, and Eugene Grant (Watson
• Quality and innovation are mutually
2005).
dependent.
Moreover, during World War II a 23-year-old
• Quality is an ethic.
Armand Feigenbaum supported the war effort and
• Quality requires continuous improvement.
continued to build the foundation for what would
• Quality is the most cost-effective, least capital-
become TQM. Feigenbaum was made manager of
intensive route to productivity.
quality control at the General Electric’s
• Quality is implemented as a total system
(GE) Schenectady plant in New York. This plant
connected to both customers and suppliers.
built the bulk of the propulsion equipment
4 Total Quality Management
Feigenbaum continued to develop and imple-
ment TQC as a senior executive at GE, both in the
USA and in Europe and Japan. Concurrently,
Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran conducted
training on the application of statistics to quality
improvement for Japanese industry workers, man-
agers, researchers, and engineers (1950 and 1954,
respectively). The Japanese Union of Scientists
and Engineers (JUSE), which focused its efforts
on the reconstruction of Japan’s economy after the
war, invited them to deliver lectures and provide
training on QC.
By the time Deming and Juran arrived, the
Japanese had already begun to study quality and
the application of statistical methods for quality
control of customer goods. They had been
exposed to “the men from the Bell Laboratories
[who] explained to members of JUSE that statis-
tical methods had improved accuracy of Ameri-
can weapons” (Deming 1982, p. 100).
When Deming visited Japan in 1950, he deliv-
ered numerous lectures across Japan. It was dur-
ing one of his lectures with top management that
Deming also introduced a chart showing produc-
tion as a system and argued that quality improve-
ment involves the entire production line (Deming
1982). It was also during this time that he popu-
larized the use of the Shewhart cycle referenced
earlier.
In his 1982 book Quality Productivity and
Competitive Position (later refined and
republished as Out of the Crisis in 1986), Deming
lamented that while the application of statistical
methods gained great importance in Japan’s
reconstruction efforts and eventually led to the
unparalleled success of the Japanese economy, in
America by 1950 the “Brilliant applications
burned, fizzled, and died out” (p. 101). Discussion
of quality control and improvement in mainstream
America had to wait until the 1980s. Nevertheless,
the American Society for Quality Control
(ASQC), now the American Society for Quality
(ASQ), was born in 1946 out of the quality efforts
implemented during World War II and has contin-
ued in existence since then with a mission to
uphold standards of quality and promote innova-
tion in quality.
For his part, Juran spread the philosophy that
achieving quality required both technical and
managerial involvement but that the main respon-
sibility for quality lies on upper management and
their application of the management process
based on “the quality trilogy”: planning, control,
and improvement (Juran 1988, p. 35G.8). This
philosophy was a radical departure from previous
quality improvement practices, which assigned
the responsibility for quality control to specific
quality control departments and was confined to
manufacturing and quality inspection.
After the visits of Juran and Deming, and
between the periods of 1955 and 1960, Kaoru
Ishikawa introduced the term company-wide
quality control (CWQC), a version of total quality
control (Ishikawa 1985). This version
decentralized quality control and spread the
responsibility on the entire organization. With
CWQC, Japanese companies started to
deemphasize the application of statistical methods
and techniques as the main approach for quality
improvement in favor of a broader approach that
combined these methods with organizational-
wide strategies and managerial methods (Strang
and Kim 2009). The lectures by Juran led to the
expansion of the concept of quality control to all
the areas and branches of the company (Juran
1988). Thus, a main difference from
Feigenbaum’s version of TQC, as explained by
Ishikawa (1985), was that while Feigenbaum
advocated TQC be conducted by QC specialists,
in Japan all units and employees became involved
(p. 90).
Moreover, building on the teachings of
Deming and Juran, in the early 1960s, Ishikawa
also introduced quality circles, which became a
component of the quality improvement practices
in Japan and later in the USA. These were small
groups of employees (5–10) that performed simi-
lar jobs, coming together periodically to study and
discuss production-related problems, identify
causes of the problems using simple statistical
techniques, including the Ishikawa diagram (fish
and bone diagram), and suggest and carry out
solutions to increase productivity and quality. By
combining the application of statistical methods/
tools with employee participation in the
Total Quality Management
company’s decision-making process, this made
quality control “everybody’s business in an orga-
nization” (Sengupta 1987, p. 54).
Quality control circles, as initially dubbed by
Ishikawa, were characterized by voluntary partic-
ipation (jishusei, Lillrank and Kanö 1989) in that
workers were not coerced or mandated to partici-
pate but by themselves “initiated and sustained the
effort” (Ishikawa 1985). The groups were often
led by a foreman or supervisor. Through its mag-
azine Quality Control for the Foremen, JUSE
promoted the approach among Japanese workers,
adopting the slogan “QC circle members—Let’s
study!” (Ishikawa, preface to the original edition,
1986), providing instructional material for study-
ing and training on quality control methods, and
organizing lectures and conventions where
workers could learn from each other. The number
of registered QC with JUSE went from three in
1962 to a staggering 148,106 by 1982 and
1,205,780 registered members in the late 1980s,
spreading rapidly throughout Japan’s industry at a
registration rate of about 1000 circles a month
(Cole 1980; Juran 1988).
1980s Onward—Rebirth of the Quality
Movement in the USA and Emergence of Total
Quality Management
The ideas and methods for improving quality, first
developed in the USA and then elaborated and
applied in Japan with spectacular results, circled
back to the USA at a time when American
manufacturing was in decline. The rebirth of the
quality movement evolved into the concept we
now know as TQM. Although TQM is often asso-
ciated with Deming, the first person to use the
term TQM to describe an inclusive
organizational-wide approach to quality control
was Feigenbaum (Watson 1995). In the 1983 ver-
sion of his Total Quality Control book,
Feigenbaum described the organization-wide
impact of a total quality control approach as one
that “deepens the work and the very concept of
quality control. . .. [P]ermits what might be called
total quality management [emphasis in original]
to cover the full scope of the product and service
‘life cycle’ from product conception through pro-
duction and customer service” (p. 14).
5
Through the years a number of American com-
panies and government organizations had
experimented, with varying degrees of success,
with the different strategies of the quality move-
ment widely popularized in Japan. However, by
all accounts, the reemergence of the interest in
quality improvement in the USA was an attempt
to respond to the success of the Japanese quality
revolution (Juran 1988).
By the 1980s this “revolution” in Japan threat-
ened American manufacturers and the national
economy. By then it was widely believed that
American products were no longer competitive
(Deming 1982). Investing in producing quality
products, reducing the cost of “unquality things,”
and implementing zero defects began to be pro-
mulgated as a way to improve profits (Crosby
1979, p. 1). Similar to the 1900s, the 1980s were
characterized by a need to reduce waste. By turn-
ing waste into better product and services, the
company would unleash a chain reaction that
would result in “lower cost, better competitive
position, happier people on the job, jobs, and
more jobs” (Deming 1986, p. 2). Also, though
not a new idea, the notion that everyone in the
organization, all the way from top management to
frontline employees, has a role in quality improve-
ment finally started to take hold in business
strategy.
Sounding the clarion call for the need for trans-
formation of management in American industry to
stay competitive, Deming (1982, 1986) proposed
a set of 14 points. These have now become equiv-
alent to TQM, though not originally presented as
such (Deming 1982, pp. 16–17, p. 30):
1. Create constancy of purpose toward improve-
ment of product and service.
2. Adopt the new philosophy.
3. Cease dependence on mass inspection.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the
basis of price tag.
5. Constantly and forever improve the system of
production and service.
6. Institute modern methods of training on
the job.
7. Institute modern methods of supervision
(leadership).
6 Total Quality Management
8. Drive out fear.
9. Break down barriers between staff areas.
10. Eliminate numerical goals for the work force.
11. Eliminate work standards and numerical
quotas.
12. Remove barriers that hinder the hourly
worker.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and
training.
14. Create a structure in top management that will
push every day on the above 13 principles.
These 14 points share similar ideas as the
37 principles promulgated by Feigenbaum.
According to Deming (1982), these points formed
the basis of the system of management
implemented in Japan post World War II.
The imperative for American firms to imple-
ment such quality management systems was ele-
vated when in 1987 the US Congress established
the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
This award, equivalent to the Deming Prize
established in Japan by JUSE in 1950, recognizes
excellence in seven quality management domains:
leadership; strategic planning; customer focus;
measurement, analysis, and knowledge manage-
ment; human resource development and manage-
ment; process management; and results.
The management literature suggests that the
adoption of TQM in the USA was rapid and wide-
spread from the mid-1980s through its peak in the
mid-1990s and then experienced a rapid decline in
popularity (Strang and Kim 2009). TQM was
enthusiastically endorsed in industry and govern-
ment by President Bush who touted the approach
as “’Reasserting our leadership’” (Carr and
Littman, 1990, p. 2, quoted in Swiss, 1990,
p. 356). But the efforts to promote TQM in gov-
ernment did not go unopposed.
One of the most oft-cited critiques of TQM was
delivered by Swiss (1992), who argued that
Deming’s version of TQM, which he called
“orthodox TQM,” was not suitable for application
to the public sector. Swiss believed that the
manufacturing foundation of TQM made it diffi-
cult to adapt to organizations that produce ser-
vices. Furthermore, unlike private companies,
government cannot readily identify its customers.
As such, the basic tenet of customer satisfaction
could not be fulfilled. Swiss also worried that
Deming’s orthodoxy, with its emphasis on inputs
and processes, would lead to goal displacement.
Finally, Swiss argued that the turnover of high-
level government executives made it difficult to
create a culture of continuous quality improve-
ment, a requirement for successful implementa-
tion of TQM. However, Swiss recognized some
value in TQM. He encouraged public sector orga-
nizations to implement a modified version of
TQM that retained customers’ feedback, the
tracking of performance, continuous improve-
ment, and employee participation as guiding prin-
ciples. Swiss may as well have been foretelling the
fate of TQM in the public sector. TQM per se was
enveloped in the New Public Management
movement.
Although the principles and values identified
by Swiss continue to be promoted, the language of
TQM in government has been replaced by prac-
tices promulgated by the National Performance
Review, with its emphasis on a citizen/customer
orientation in government and cutting waste; the
Government Performance and Results Act
(GPRA) of 1993, reauthorized in 2010 as Gov-
ernment Performance and Results Modernization
Act, with its emphasis on performance measure-
ment, strategic management, and stakeholder
involvement; as well as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
of 2002 (SOX), with its emphasis on accountabil-
ity and accuracy in financial practices.
The private sector TQM appears to have been
replaced by the Six Sigma method. This method,
first developed by the Motorola company engi-
neer Bill Smith in the mid-1980s, seeks to
improve performance through the reduction of
defects. The approach harkens back to the prac-
tices of the QC movement, with its emphasis on
statistical analysis, Shewhart cycle, quality cir-
cles, and the qualitative methodology introduced
by Ishikawa (Folaron 2003). It also encompasses
some of the values of TQM and the ISO 900 and
QS 1200, such as the focus on satisfying cus-
tomers’ desires. General Electric, once again,
played a crucial role in the dissemination of the
Six Sigma method when in 1995 CEO Jack Welch
discovered it and successfully adopted it to
Total Quality Management
improve performance and financial performance
(Watson 2001).
Conclusion
The history of TQM is firmly grounded in a foun-
dation that consists of the application of statistical
methods to quality control (QC). Though not
always discussed, early QC efforts were also
based on an underlying logic of a system perspec-
tive where all aspects of the production process
needed intervention to ensure products that satisfy
customers’ needs and reduce waste. That QC was
practically abandoned in the USA after playing
center stage during World War II may have been
due to the fact that for the most part, quality
control was viewed as the responsibility of quality
departments, engineers in particular, and not
managers.
Although the teachings of Juran and
Feigenbaum emphasized the important role man-
agers play in the improvement of quality, the
realization in Japan that quality was everybody’s
job helped post-World War II Japan become a
major industrial economy. Only then, in the
1980s, were the principles of TQM, often associ-
ated with Deming, adopted in the USA not only in
manufacturing but also in service organizations,
including healthcare. In the public sector, where
TQM was received with skepticism by some, it
became part of the larger New Public Manage-
ment discourse. While some of the values
espoused by TQM have been maintained, TQM
as such has largely faded from both the public and
the private sectors.
Cross-References
▶ New Public Management
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