Introduction of Customization of Quality Practices Analysis

            Quality culture has been getting a lot of attention from both an academic perspective and organizational perspective. The aim of the attention has been to explore how quality culture influences individuals operating within it. From a contemporary point of view, quality culture is actually a group of values which guides how improvements can be made to working practices and outputs resulting from it. Countless organizations have implemented practices of quality culture and some of them have gained positive while others have gained negative results. At present, organizations modify these practices for gaining an advantage in terms of quality.   Although ‘Customization of Quality Practices’ adds value to the existing literature on quality culture, it offers more conceptual knowledge than practical knowledge.

Overview of Argument of Customization of Quality Practices Analysis

        The very first limitation is that this study is not focusing on several organizations but only a limited amount of sample. Results obtained from a specific organization cannot be implemented to another firm operating in another industry. There are other limitations as well.

Main Points of Study of Customization of Quality Practices Analysis

        This article concentrates on a comparatively new area of context-dependent theory or approach in the research of quality management. It also studies the effect of organizational culture and quality culture on the efficiency of different practices of quality management. It has been determined that the evolution of quality culture in culture with organization and its influence on customization of quality management practices contributes immensely to the quality management field. Empirical support is offered by the findings for the argument of context dependency of practices of quality management, which seems to advance the study on customization of such practices.

        The study has practical value for organizational managers as well. It is confirmed by empirical results and theoretical arguments that organizations pursuing practices of quality management without a precise understanding of the customization need couldn’t meet their expectations regarding performance improvement. The information used in this research was collected from HPM or high-performance manufacturing project. It is actually a comprehensive project carried out by a team of global expert researchers in the field of operations management and production. The datasets seemed to involve 238 plants of manufacturing located across the USA, Sweden, Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany, Finland, and Austria. The plants were chosen from machinery, electronics, and automobile supplier industries.

My Position of Customization of Quality Practices Analysis

            The first hypothesis is that without the establishment of quality culture as an organizational culture’s part, practices of quality exploitation enhance the performance of quality in operations performance in more sustainable practices compared to exploration practices. The second hypothesis is that when culture of quality becomes dominant in the culture of organization, practices of quality exploration generate higher performance of quality in operations performance in comparison with practices of quality exploitation. For being consistent with the hypotheses, QEI or practices of quality exploitation and QER or practices of quality exploration were ope rationalized as latent-constructs of second-order by four constructs of first order. Construct items were determined on the basis of a thorough literature review. The initial set was actually narrowed down by professors with experience and skills in quality management. CFA or Confirmatory Factor Analysis was utilized for checking the model validity, reliability, and fitness in LISREL. The authors also assessed the fitness of the model using some specific measures of fit. Measures of absolute fit like RMSEA or Root Mean Square Error of Approximation below 0.06 are accepted.

        Quality culture was actually ope rationalized with 4 dimensions including process orientation, prevention, quality responsibility, and customer orientation. For each dimension, three items were determined on the basis of present literature. Bernbach coefficient was utilized for evaluating the reliability of internal consistency of scales. An EFA or explanatory factor analysis was also conducted by authors for each item set. It was indicated by the analysis result that only one element seemed to emerge from each item set. The percent, eigenvalues, and loading of variance were analyzed for convergent validity, and acceptable results were shown by all of them. In the later analysis, quality culture was actually a sum mated scale that consisted of these dimensions.

        The typical method of estimating manufacturing performance was followed by the authors in four dimensions including flexibility, delivery, quality, and cost. The scales for this performance were evaluated for reliability and validity. In the analysis of regression, performance of quality was measured as the factor score of its items of measurement. Meanwhile, the overall performance was analyzed by the average of flexibility, delivery, quality, and cost.

        I believe that both the framework and methodology adopted by authors for testing hypotheses were correct since they were directly addressing the elements involved in hypotheses. Both regression and Bernbach analysis were used for analyzing the data collected and if I were a researcher then I would have also chosen the same methods. Both of these methods are known for being precise and I would have conducted the two tests as well. For determining performance, different items and factors influencing it were selected and they were analyzed before performance was estimated. Moving on, conclusion and discussion are in line with the findings. What makes it better than other studies is that practical implications have been provided and it has also been explained how research can be improved in the future.

        The first limitation is that the research considers the influence of culture only at the micro-organizational level because of the dataset limitation. Only three industries have been chosen and healthcare industry has been completely left out of it along with other industries such as sports and clothing industry. Therefore, we cannot implement the results obtained from this research to these industries because we don’t have sufficient evidence. The second limitation is that researchers didn’t consider national culture as a factor that could influence quality management. It has been argued by authors that national culture is capable of influencing both quality culture and organizational culture (Abu-Jarad, Yusof, & Nikbin, 2010). Thus, including this factor is significant for making sure that culture quality is estimated effectively. The last limitation is that more factors were not involved in the research and involving other factors like environmental change can also increase the scope of the study.

Conclusion on Customization of Quality Practices Analysis

        Quality culture has been getting a lot of attention from both an academic perspective and organizational perspective. It is all about a set of practices which can help an organization in improving the performance of practices along with the results which result from them. Quality culture is affected by several factors and this study has taken these factors into consideration as well.

        First of all, my argument is in line with the limitations which have been presented by the authors. For instance, I considered that the research was not practical enough because it had chosen only a few industries out of many industries available in countries, not to mention that only specific countries were chosen. There are many other countries which could have been chosen for conducting the study and collecting information like the UK. This also seems to narrow the scope of research because we cannot apply the results on different industries present in nations where the study was not conducted. Moving on, the authors have also said that this study lacks precision because the national culture was not considered as a factor capable of influencing performance. Thus, my argument is aligned with the limitations which have been enlisted by the authors themselves (Wu, Zhang, & Schroeder, 2011).

References on Customization of Quality Practices Analysis

Abu-Jarad, I. Y., Yusof, N., & Nikbin, D. (2010). A review paper on organizational culture and organizational performance. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 1(3).

Wu, S. J., Zhang, D., & Schroeder, R. G. (2011). Customization of quality practices: the impact of quality culture. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, 28(3), 263-279.