Question

During the 1990s, the management "craze" was TQM (Total Quality Management) in which workers used the term "customer" to describe anyone who was receiving their services, not just real customers that were purchasing goods and services from the firm. Government agencies also joined in. For example, IRS workers were told to call taxpayers with whom they dealt "customers," and when I was doing some work at the Tennessee Valley Authority, we were to call people in other departments that ordered a computer from my department "customers."

Using your reading from Peter Klein and F.A. Hayek, explain why the TQM initiatives tended to work better at regular business firms than they did with government agencies.

Answer 1

Total Quality Management is a business management technique that achieved great traction in the private sector in the United States beginning in the early 1980s. Modern Total Quality Management has emerged as a management approach based on a set of fundamental quality principles put together with a bunch of diverse procedures that gives guidance and structure in the practical affairs of running an institution. But these diverse quality approaches must be applied in a focused and unified way.

Following the lead of a few early implementers public sector institutions, sections and portions of quality management were more generally put to work in government through reengineering attempts during the 1990s. However, due to mounting fiscal pressures in federal and state government budgets across the nation, quality programs hev come under closer scrutiny as to whether they are yeilding required cost benefits to justify agency resources.

Assessing the value of implementing quality management in organizations is problematic. Many have noted noted that there is a large information vacuum in terms of measuring and evaluating the results of implementing Total Quality Management in organizations.

Among government officials and practitioners, too Total Quality Management has had mixed reactions. Research suggests that professional, technical, and scientific public employees perform the bulk of value adding activities in their jobs and are the least favorably disposed towards Total Quality Management implementation. Resistance to Total Quality Management by practitioners include arguments that it is merely another passing managerial fad and that it is not well suited to a particular kind of work done by their organization. It is also argued that it increases paperwork, meetings and training time and that it takes away from the overall time available to do the “real work”. During the 1990s, there was a growing concern about the actual cost benefits associated with Total Quality Management programs in corporate organizations and articles in professional and academic journals began to question whether quality management really delivered meaningful organization improvement.