Meta-analysis of the relationship between quality management practices and firm performance—implications for quality management theory development

Academics and managers have struggled for many years to understand and delineate the role of marketing in explaining business performance differences between firms. Most of the theory base for any such attempts has to be informed by strategic management theory, since the primary question that strategic management seeks to answer is why some firms outperform others over time. This paper synthesizes three major streams of thought in strategic management with the empirical and theoretical literature on strategic marketing to develop an integrative theory-based conceptual framework linking marketing with firms’ business performance.

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Marketing and business performance

There has been a plethora of published research related to total quality management (TQM) in the last few decades. However, very few studies focused on cataloging critical factors of TQM. One of the objectives of this literature review was to investigate the state of TQM by examining and listing various TQM factors identified based on survey studies conducted in different countries and published in a variety of journals over the past decade. An examination of 76 survey studies that used an integrated approach to TQM showed that the TQM factors could be grouped under 25 categories. An analysis of the 347 survey based research articles published between 1989 and 2000 using these 25 factors as a framework revealed the most frequently covered TQM factors in the literature. Another goal of the paper was to analyse the objectives of these articles by year and type of journal they were published in to determine the trends in TQM survey based studies and recommend future direction for research. The analysis showed that the objectives of the 347 studies could be grouped under six categories.

L.B. Forker

Papers

Factors affecting supplier quality performance