A study on effect of performing quality management system on organizational productivity

Article history: Received December 2, 2012 Received in revised format 18 March 2013 Accepted 22 March 2013 Available online March 24 2013 The main purpose of article is to survey the effect of Quality Management System (QMS) on organization efficiency based on the concept of change management. The role of top organization management for QMS implementation and change management solutions to eliminate organization resistance are investigated. In this study, fourteen Deming’s principles are independent variables, organization productivity is dependent variable and the study examines six different hypotheses. Cronbach Alpha coefficient is calculated as 87.62%, which validates research questionnaire. The proposed study of this paper uses t-student to examine all six hypotheses in a case study from a firm named Aria Sanaat factory. The results of this study confirm that there are some positive effects on organizational management variables & establishing training and explanation courses & meetings.


Introduction
Total Quality Management (TQM) and Quality Management Systems (QMS) are general and regular methodologies for management tendencies in quality debates and efficiency improvements.These two techniques have become some of the most popular solution strategies for productivity improvement.The purpose of this approach is to increase performances of business units in terms of quality, efficiency, customer's satisfaction and profitability (Sadikoglu & Zehir, 2010).Quality cannot be separated from human's life and the literatures show quality is designable and thoughtful before business (Kemp, 2006) and shall be surveyed from customer's point of view.Quality consists of every physical or nonphysical component, which changes the product value in customer's perspectives.
Development of competitive business environment, changing customer's choices, companies' activities peer-industries in different industries and services have created motivations among managers to pay especial attention on TQM.The outcome of this attendance is reach better quality, business performance improvement and competitiveness (Feng et al., 2006).The development of quality management systems helps for implementing quality standards.Although these standards are not able to describe the quality management system but they are required and are needed to formulate, to analyze and to improve processes.The standard of ISO900 family has been the most popular quality management system and many companies and organizations all around the world have used it.Quality management systems help companies understand the most qualified products and recovered processes and the complexity of these factors leads to gain customers satisfaction (Pfeifer, 2002).
Researchers have performed tremendous efforts around quality management systems in recent years.Zhang et al. (2012), for instance, investigated the moderating role of contextual factors on quality management practices and Kim et al. (2012) studied the relationship between quality management practices and innovation.According to Pfeifer et al. (2004), integrating six sigma with quality management systems sigma must be integrated with management systems concepts.He also recommended combining these two program challenges and their common features to get the maximum profit.Aggelogiannopoulos et al. (2007) studied the implementation of a QMS based on the ISO 9000 family in a Greek small-sized winery and discussed on how programming and implementing of quality management system could help improve productivity.He pointed that the top managers should follow to get the whole internal and external profit from emission of quality management system certificates and they must look for increasing the market share, forcing to new markets in gaining such profits.Priede (2012) explained that quality management has a significant role in increasing the competiveness of companies and economic over the past 60 years.He reviewed the literature for quality management system and ISO9001 and concentrated on its strategic requirements.The author noticed to introduce the quality management as a significant part in economic completion by global competitiveness report.The strategic benefits and importance of quality management system has been studied through the company's observation and the implementation of quality management system has been verified in the world (Priede, 2012).Many researchers have verified that there is strong correlation between quality and productivity (Defeo & Juran, 2010).
The present study tries to verify whether there is a relationship between the increase of productivity by performing the quality management systems and the existence of employees responds against the changes.The primary objective of the present study is to study the effects of QMS implementation on organization performance by considering the change management roles.Therefore, we first review the productivity and QMS literatures and present the proposed method and conceptual model.We also discuss the research hypotheses by debating the assumptions and by using the t-student statistics tests and discuss outstanding outcomes of the research.

Productivity
Productivity is an average measure of the efficiency of production and it is calculated as a ratio of production output to what is required to produce it (inputs of capital, labor, land, energy, materials, etc.).The measure of productivity can be expressed as a total output per one unit of a total input.There are different advantages on of reaching high productivity and productivity growth plays essential role because more income means that the firm can meet its expectations.In addition, the firm has been able to accomplish to meet customers' obligations, suppliers, workers, shareholders, and governments (taxes and regulation), and still remain competitive or even improve its competitiveness in the market place (Gollop, 1979;Kurosawa, 1975;Pineda, 1990;Saari, 2006).Productivity expresses as a relationship between the quantity of goods and services produced by a business or an economy and the quantity of labor, capital, energy, and other resources needed to produce the goods and services (Worrell et al., 2001).The results of the activities performed about productivity are stated in four perspectives, which include cost reduction, decrease process start up, increasing quantity and quality improvement.There are also five strategies to reach productivity stated in Table 1.

Table 1
Five productivity strategies As mentioned earlier, productivity plays an essential role in any manufacturing systems and it normally depends on the product design, process design, namely the quality of equipment and facilities.The design of production processes includes the movements towards production design and this includes process design, establishment of facility location, devices layout, required capacities, process plans, production timing, supervision and control methods.Controls of manufacturing activities include operational and financial control.Control information is planned to make sure that it complies with operational activities with planned level to help decision making for development plans.Although, the initial design of the product & process have the greatest effect on productivity, it is required to control the operation and improve it continually (Prokopenko, 1992).

Quality Management System
Quality management system (QMS) can be expressed as the organizational structure, procedures, processes and resources required to implement quality management.Early systems concentrated on the outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling.By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so the focus was shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early development of problems via continuous improvement cycles.According to Pfeifer (2004) the necessary characteristics of QMS are summarized in Table 2.

Research
The Deming rules and regulations contributes QMS implementation

Fig. 3. Conceptual Model
Table 3 shows details of all six hypotheses as follows,

Table 3 Research Hypotheses
Hypotheses Definition First H 0 : Some of the organizations by spending adequate human resources and financial facilities can continually perform quality management system.
Second H 0 : The commitment of top managers of the organizations whose products are with good quality is not than the top managers of the organizations producing the low quality products.
Third H 0 : By applying change management principles, we cannot reduce the barriers in performing quality management system or eliminate it.
Fourth H 0 : We cannot increase productivity considerably in the organization by applying Deming 14 points in the main and current processes.
Fifth H 0 : By performing quality management system at organization, continually, we cannot increase the organization productivity.
Sixth H 0 : By holding education periods for the employees, we cannot reduce the resistance in doing the organization plans.
The distributions of the variables of hypotheses 1 to 6 are investigated as descriptively from very high, low, variance and responses mean.

Table 4
The descriptive investigation of the variables As shown in Table 4, the highest mean is associated with the first hypothesis (4.02) and the lowest mean is associated with the second hypothesis (3.3).

The results
The proposed study of this paper uses t-student test to examine each hypothesis and Friedman test is applied to rank the relative importance of each hypothesis.

The first hypothesis: The effect of human and financial resources
The first hypothesis of this survey investigates the effects of human and financial resources on QMS.Table 5 demonstrates the results of our survey using one-sample test.Based on the results of t-student is equal to 14.356, which is well above the critical value of 1.671 and we can reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the human and financial factors play important role on QMS implementation when the level of significance is five percent.

The second hypothesis: The effect of top management commitment
The second hypothesis of this survey investigates the effects of top management commitment on QMS.Table 6 demonstrates the results of our survey using one-sample test.Based on the results of t-student is equal to 3.415, which is well above the critical value of 1.671 and we can reject the null hypothesis and conclude that top management commitment plays important role on QMS implementation when the level of significance is five percent.

The third hypothesis: The effect of change management on QMS implementation
The third hypothesis of this survey studies the impacts of top management commitment on QMS.
Table 7 shows the results of our survey using one-sample test.

Table 7
The results of testing the third hypothesis (Test value = 3) Based on the results of t-student is equal to 5.104, which is well above the critical value of 1.671 and we can reject the null hypothesis and conclude that change management plays essential role on QMS implementation when the level of significance is five percent.

The fourth hypothesis: The effect of Deming 14 factors on QMS implementation
The fourth hypothesis of this survey takes into consideration of the effects of Deming 14 factors on QMS.Table 8 demonstrates the results of our survey using one-sample test.Based on the results of tstudent is equal to 7.510, which is well above the critical value of 1.671 and we can reject the null hypothesis and conclude that Deming's 14 rules and regulations play important role on QMS implementation when the level of significance is five percent.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation on the effects of QMS implementation to increase organizational productivity through implementing change management.The proposed study of this paper has designed a questionnaire and distributed among some managers of an Iranian firm.
The results of testing six hypotheses have indicated that the proposed model of this paper could contribute to productivity improvement.
By establishing the training and justification courses for employees, the resistance of program and organizational design implementation can be reduced.

Sixth Hypothesis 6
Establishing training and explanation courses and meetings for different managers and employees can decrease the problems of program implementation and organizational resistance.

VAR17
Effective communication between organizational hierarchy and managers and employees reduces the problems in new plans.

VAR18
Using qualified, trained, skilled and expert employees in new plans lead to decrease operational problems.

VAR19
By eliminating the barriers between employees (and managers) and encouragement to solve problems as a group and removing the fear of new plans, operational problems can be reduces.VAR20

Table 2 Characterist
Organization Productivity".Fig.3shows the research conceptual model and different variables have been defined to implement statistical test.Full specifications of these variables can be seen in Appendix.

Table 5
The results of testing the first hypothesis (Test value = 3)

Table 6
The results of testing the second hypothesis (Test value = 3)