Success attributes for quality improvement strategy : an organizing framework

Recognizing the importance of quality improvement strategy, the relevant strategy literature offers several anecdotal and prescriptive narratives for quality strategy success. Many of the narratives describe the integration among key elements of management strategy: corporate culture, reward systems, information systems, quality efforts, team building, quality outcomes, and customer value. However, the current literature provides neither clear information nor an organizing framework to translate these elements into success attributes. The purpose of this study is to address these limitations in the literature through conceptual development and methodological refinement.

This study strives to answer the research question: What are the components for a continuous quality improvement strategy, and how do they combine together to successfully affect company performance?

The researcher selects one industry versus different industries to minimize the effect that industry has on quality strategy. He selects the electronics industry because of his previous research efforts and the knowledge that quality is a major strategy within that industry. He samples firms from a relevant population of electronics firms that are the world sales leaders for their principal products and are known for their successful efforts in quality improvement strategy. He selects four business units from three organizations. This selection also allows investigation under different manufacturing conditions such as U.S. manufacturing versus Southeast Asia manufacturing and low-volume high-tech manufacturing versus high-volume lower-tech manufacturing.

This study explores the research question through interviews, archival records, direct observation, surveys, and management-team presentations.

The researcher collects the primary data by doing the following:

• interviewing liaison managers about general business-unit information,
• interviewing forty three business-unit managers about specific quality-related information,
• studying archival records to confirm interview information, and
• observing meetings and business-unit operations to confirm interview and archival data.

Using an inductive, constant comparative method, the researcher systematically codes the data into a taxonomy of fifty attributes for successful quality strategy. The researcher then confirms the reliability of the attributes by doing the following:

• consulting with the liaison managers to refine the attributes into a survey.
• surveying the business-unit managers to determine how strongly they believe that the attributes exist at their business units, and
• presenting to the business-unit senior management teams to determine the importance of the survey results to their quality strategies.

The researcher explores the relevance of the research by looking for common themes in the research results. An extensive literature review ties the themes into an organizing framework. The researcher addresses limitations in the framework and provides guidance for future research on the moderating effects of innovation and quality strategy.