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Quality culture and TQMSteen Hildebrandt a , Kai Kristensen a , Gopal Kanji b & JensJørn Dahlgaard aa The Aarhus School of Business , Aarhus, Denmarkb Sheffield City Polytechnic , Sheffield, UKPublished online: 28 Jul 2006.

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TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT, VOL. 2, NO. 1,1991 1

Quality culture and TQM

STEEN HILDEBRANDT', F A 1 KRISTENSEN~, GOPAL KANJI' & JENS J ~ R N DAHLGAARD T h e Aarhus School ofBusiness, Aarhus, Denmark & 2 ~ h e f i e l d City Polytechnic, Shefield, UK

Abstract In the article the concept of quality culture is introduced. Its relation to total quality management is discussed and a procedure for working with quality culture in practice is proposed.

Introduction

Changing corporate culture is increasingly recognized as one of the primary conditions for the successful implementation of total quality management. The means for uncovering current underlying assumptions and behaviours are examined as well as their relevance to the organization's objectives as a result of adopting total quality management. How to close the inevitable cultural gap between the old and required behaviours is explored, together with the implementation of the new behaviours.

Taking its starting point in recent literature on quality, quality management and corporate culture, the purpose of the paper is to introduce a new concept within manage- ment theory, namely the concept quality culture. This concept is then discussed within the field of total quality management, and finally the paper is concluded with some suggestions concerning a practical procedure for working with quality culture.

The concept of culture

The concept of corporate culture bas been used in recent years to develop and understand the concept of culture in connection with the study of organizations. In this article the concept of quality culture is introduced and developed for the better understanding of the way quality manifests itself in companies.

There exist more than a hundred definitions of culture (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, [I9521 1963) and therefore it is beyond the scope of this article to go into depth with the general concept of culture. However the concept of culture, which is now considered for the theory of organizations, has its origin within anthropology and is given by Tyler ([I8711 1958) as follows:

"Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society".

A number of behavioural scientists have in recent years been working intensively within the area of corporate culture, basing their work on this definition. This idea is not new,

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2 STEEN HILDEBRANDT ETAL.

however. It is thought provoking that more than 30 years ago one of the leading experts within quality management, Juran (1956), proposed the application of the anthropological concept of culture to business organizations in order to create a beneficial change within the organizations.

Organizational theory and corporate culture

First of all we will consider the specific basis of the concept of quality culture, viz. the corporate culture or organizational culture, and will introduce the concepts of formal and informal organization, as these are central to the total quality management approach.

Organizariotral theory

The theory of organizations is often described through different types of organizational models. These models may be mutually different, hut have certain characteristics which are based on a stable structure. T h e traditional model of an organization is therefore most often a model emphasizing characteristics of: hierarchy, division of labour and communication.

I t is a well-known fact that the organizational structure is traditionally described in an organization chart, and is important for the understanding of an organization, but has a limited perspective.

Therefore, it is traditional to supplement the description of the formal organization with a description of the informal organization. By informal organization we mean the many by management non-planned and maybe unknown, but often stable patterns of behaviour which fill and characterize major parts of the daily routines. The informal organization is described in different ways, e.g. 'the human group', where the informal aspect is described as norms and roles in the socio-cultural system and the concept 'work group', describing a shadow organization established by the workers in defence of management's 'infringements'.

In recent years, another important source of understanding of an organization has been demonstrated through different forms of environmental relationships. It provides a model, which includes the importance of the environment to organizational structure and behaviour emphasizing some important variables in the environmental relations, e.g. market, technology, politics, financing and manpower.

Understanding both the formal, the informal and the environmental-related frame- work of description is important in order to understand total quality management and quality culture.

Corporate culture

The concept of culture has been the subject of considerable interest in the recent literature on organizational theory, but has not to any significant degree been discussed in literature on quality. The introduction of the concept of culture may be seen as the culmination of a long trend of development in organizational theory. At first, this development meant that the conception of the organization as merely a tool was abandoned in favour of the independent social formation or social units with inner dynamics of its own. Further the fundamental social unit in the organization, and the idea of the organization as a cultural community was introduced and has gained ground.

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QUALITY CULTURE AND TQM 3

There are many definitions of the concept corporate culture. A few examples will be given in the following:

'Corporate culture can be defined as a set of commonly held attitudes, values, and beliefs that guide the behaviour of an organization's members' (Martin, 1985).

'Culture can be defined as the shared philosophies, ideologies, values, assump- tions, beliefs, experiences, attitudes, and norms that knit a community together' (Kilman, Saxton & Serpa, 1985).

'Culture will be used here to mean the beliefs top managers in a company share about how they should conduct their business' (Lorsch, 1985).

Formulated broadly, it applies that corporate culture deals with values and norms in organizations. The company's culture is expressed in visible terms in many different ways: through physical conditions like buildings, thecompany's stationery, the quality including design of the products, the colour of the company cars, etc. It is also expressed through the way people in the organization co-operate and solve problems. Generally speaking, the concept of visible management is closely associated with the use of the concept of culture in management theory.

Deal &Kennedy (1984), in discussing the corporate culture, have listed the following conceptual elements:

corporate climate values heroes rites and ceremonies the cultural network

and further suggested:

'A strong culture is a system of informal rules which explain in detail how people should behave most of the time',

'A strong culture enables people to get a better idea of what they do so that they are more motivated to work harder'.

Schein (1988) argues that the concept of culture ought to be reserved for the deeper- lying level of basic assumptions and convictions that are common to members of an organ- ization. These assumptions and convictions are acquired responses to a group's problems of surviving in their external environment and its problems of internal integration. According to Schein, a distinction should be made between these deeper-lying assump- tions and the systems and values which are the form of manifestation of culture in day-to-day life, but are not the epitome of culture.

As indicated above, culture is an acquired product of group experience and therefore can only appear where there is a definable group with a significant history. It should be noted that this is a considerable modification in relation to the management-oriented concept of culture. I t is a conception of culture which is rooted more in theories of group development and group dynamics than in anthropologic theories of how cultures develop. This entails the assumption that it is possible in this context to take advantage of learning theories and to develop a dynamic conception of corporate culture. However, it also entails the assumption that it is possible to integrate knowledge from other fields of theory with a view to gaining both a broader and deeper understanding of the extremely complex phenomena involved.

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4 STEEN HILDEBRANDT ETAL.

I t should be noted that the corporate culture concept mentioned above does not comprise obvious patterns of behaviour. Schein argues in this context that obvious behaviour is always determined both by cultural conditions and by the haphazard situ- ations arising in the external environment. Regularities in behaviour may thus reflect the environment as much as culture and therefore should not be used as the primary basis of defining culture. This does not mean that behaviour is of no importance in this context, but it does mean that not until we have uncovered the deeper layers can we decide whether it is a symptom reflecting culture or not.

The concept of culture as a tool of control and change has been at the centre of interest in recent years. A central question has been to what degree it is possible through a conscious process to formulate a new, but expedient culture and next have it accepted in an organization by means of a rational, centrally directedprocess of change.

However, regarding culture the management-inspired way of thinking, i.e. looking optimistically at the possibility of change, has created some controversy with a more anthropology-inspired way of thinking, i.e. relatively resistant to conscious change.

In discussing the concept of quality culture it is necessary to look at these two extreme points of view, where the management-oriented viewpoint in its most extreme formulation regards culture as something 'coming from above' in the organizational hierarchy, i.e. something created through management decisions and management actions, and which therefore can also be changed through management decisions, whereas the anthropology- oriented approach regards culture as something spontaneous, growing up from below as the result of many people's individual actions and experience, and which therefore cannot be easily changed through any centralized process.

Like in so many other fields these viewpoints are not as reconcilable as it might appear on the face of it. This question will be taken up later, but at this point it may be suggested that a so-called management-oriented viewpoint does not necessarily entail the type of 'top-down'-view mentioned above, but might have connection with the above-mentioned anthropology-orientation.

An example of cultural change is the Xerox case. The Xerox company was forced to a radical change of corporate culture due to a collapse of its market share in the world. T o overcome this problem they did not minimize the extent of the cultural change necessary. Some of the changes they have adopted for this purpose are given in Table 1 as a result of which they have re-captured their world market share. Later we will discuss how a change like this may be achieved (see Working with the culture of quality in practice: the culture cycle and Quality culture, quality improvement, and TQM).

Quality, corporate culture and quality culture

The concepts of culture and corporate culture have been introduced here on the assump- tion that there is an association between the quality concept and the corporate culture concept. As mentioned before, working with quality presupposes that you work with the company's culture or with the elements of the company's culture that manifest themselves in relevant quality dimensions.

In recent years, the quality concept has attracted increasing attention and created a quality wave in management literature. A wave which introduced various books including 'In Search of Excellence', 'Thriving on Chaos' and 'Out of the Crisis'.

Pirsig (1974) has pointed out through the principal character 'Faidros' of his book that quality and culture are tied together. What excited Faidros was the whole idea that a concept like quality should even be subjected to a view. He realized that if quality by

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6 STEEN HILDEBRANDT ETAL.

Production of goods and services

Managerial processes

input / output t t

Processes of cooperation

Figure 1. Qunliry or o rota1 arrrrs,nanr ofthe company's supply and denrat,d.

conception to a broader, more psychological and sociological viewpoint. A central part of this development is the concept of culture.

As has been mentioned earlier, it is the value of the concept of culture as a tool of control and change which has been at the centre of interest of organizational theory in the concept of culture. By way of example, culture as a parameter of control has been empha- sized in connection with the management of decentralized companies where traditional tools of control are not satisfactory, but also in a large number of other contexts has the concept of culture been discussed in connection with the management process itself.

Collin (1988) suggests that the organizational culture is a tool of change, and he refers, among other companies, to Scandinavian Airlines Systems which has worked actively with the concept of culture and says: One must try to generalize the result in order to arrive at general knowledgeabout organizational culturesand the tools to beused for controllingand changing it. A conflict has arrived, however, as mentioned before, in the conception within the theory of organizations and between organizational theory and social anthropology.

Within social anthropology it has been a fundamental idea that cultures are very difficult to change, whereas the theories of organization and management emphasize the importance of culture as a tool of change. In other words: what explains the difference between unchangeable and changeable cultures?

In an attempt to understand the changeability and stability of cultures, Collin (1988) introduces the concepts group-dynamic and internalized norms. It looks as if culture may be of two essentially different types, depending on whether they are kept together by group-dynamic or internalized norms. The first type is relatively changeable, the latter quite resistant to change, which can be explained by the fact that the internalized control is acontrol where the drivingforce is in the person himself and where the person is controlled with no help from external influences, including pressure from group members. Whereas the group-dynamic control is linked up with the group. A characteristic feature of group control is that the dynamics for the group's processes of change often come from a leader or from a small number of leaders.

Collin (1987) also points out the two forms of cultural changeability that are both relevant in this connection. One is the possibility of changing a culture, i.e. changing the contents of the culture. The other might be called the question of change in cultures, i.e. the question of whether changeability in itself may be a value in a culture and thus part of the contents of culture.

From a management point of view, the establishment of a culture susceptible to change has advantages as well as disadvantages as compared with what might be called a conservative culture. This can be explained by the fact that the culture susceptible to change is by definition adaptable and puts up only little resistance to new processes if they prove to be expedient, but lacks loyalty to the procedures.

Within organizational theory, cultural change is therefore a question of changing cultures as a rational process, beginning with a suspicion among the management of an

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QUALITY CULTURE AND TQM 7

organization that its culture is dysfunctional, continuing with a systematic sociological mapping out to understand whether this is really the case, followed by an effort to formu- late a new, more adaptive culture, and finally an effort to abolish the old and introduce a new culture.

Total quality management as a concept is a question of determining, developing and controlling a company's quality. For this purpose, a number of tools and procedures have been developed, ranging from statistical techniques to for example quality circles, and they are all described in literature.

What is special about emphasizing the quality culture concept in this connection is an assumption that a considerable part of literature so far on control and management of quality is too superficial. In real terms, a parallel can be drawn to French &Bell's organiz- ational iceberg (French &Bell, 1978). By superficial is meant that a number of formal and real aspects of quality are treated, but the more deep-rooted causal and explanatory factors remain hidden and subconscious. Various literature in this area has tried to pen- etrate some of the explanatory factors, e.g. see Peters & Waterman (1982), Peters (1988), and Waterman (1987).

With a view to defining more precisely some of the cultural elements that are relevant in this connection, it has been found expedient to use Johnson & Scholes' model of influence (see Fig. 2).

Figure 2. Main ryper offnctorr of infiencr determining the total culture of the organization,

Nature of environment

values in society values in local society values of organized groups

Type of company

market situation productshechnology tradelindustry

Total culture of the organization

Special character of company

history size management style administration style (= admin. systems)

Special character of employees

values attitudes language interests sex, age . knowledge, experience groupings dress

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This model is general and it deals with the total culture of the organization and thus points to a number of elements which together form the culture of the organization, but at the same time, the model also points to a number of the elements which in practice must enter into the concept of quality culture. A brief description of these main elements are as follows:

Narure of the environment As mentioned in the model, the nature of the environment includes factors like: values in the (local) society and values of organized groups. The increasing interest in quality seen in recent years may be regarded as an example of changes in value in society in general and among special groups.

Type of company The type of company is a separate cultural factor. I t is a question of the com- pany's market situation, its products/technology and the trade or industry it is in. The market and competition situation are relevant for the company's quality situation, and the same applies quite traditionally also to the product technology side.

The special character of the company The special character of the company is made up of its history, size, management style, administration style. The sub-culture concept is often included under management culture. In this context, especially in connection with the com- pany's history, reference should be made to the importance of the different stages of growth or development to the culture of the organization and thus to the management situation (cf. Schein, 1988).

The special character of the employees The special character of the employees is made up of the employees' values, attitudes, language, experience, etc., and it is not least in this complex field we are to find elements of the company's quality culture. This is where we find the values that substantially determine the actual/manifest quality of the company's products and services.

Management literature enumerates different methods of attacking change-methods that are relevant here. Collin (1987) has shown the relevance of rites, group-dynamic mechanisms, recognition of the effectiveness of norms and rewards and punishment to bring about cultural change. Schein (1988) enlists different types of processes of change: change as a general evolutionary process, change as adaptation, learning or a specific evolutionary process, change as a therapeutic process, change as a revolutionary process and change as a managed process.

Working with the culture of quality in practice: the culture cycle

We shall not elaborate on the different methods of attacking change mentioned above, but use them as part of total quality management.

T Q M projects are not a clearly defined concept. A formal definition will not be attempted here, but in the following, we shall attempt to characterize the possible contents of a T Q M project. I t should be noted that the presentation is based partly on general project management theory, and partly on the authors' experience of participating in T Q M projects in practice.

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QUALITY CULTURE AND TQM 9

One of the leading principles of total quality management is that during the process one discovers new aspects of the goal. This requires an ability to assess, situation con- sciousness, flexibility, ability to co-operate and courage to enter the unknown. It also becomes clear that total quality management and quality projects are not simple, rational processes of solving problems, but complex social processes of change.

The management idea underlying this formulation is that management consists in creating a framework that enables the employees to display their intelligence and creativity and, at the same time, ensure that it is done in accordance with the company's fundamental ideas and mission. This formulation is based on a holistic view of man, in this context aiming primarily at a view of the individual as a unique human being.

In the following, we will list some postulates, assumptions and views concerning total quality management and try to outline the work method.

There is no standard recipe for a good total quality management project. Each single project must be planned and implemented on the basis of the real situation in the company in question.

A total quality management project cannot be implemented through a manage- ment decision. A T Q M project implements itself concurrently with the involve- ment of employees and managers at different levels and the setting up of quality groups in the company.

Every employee is in fact a quality and profitability centre him/herself and, together with others, forms one or more natural quality groups.

When it comes to quality andprofitability, the individual employee is the natural centre of creativity, initiatives, positive participation, etc.

The traditional decision-making structure in the company is not necessarily changed by a T Q M project, which is partly because of the group phenomenon and partly because managers at different levels participate in relevant groups.

A T Q M project logically requires that each employee and each manager identi- fies hislher customers. In this connection it is of no importance whether this or these customers are other employees/managers or customers in the traditional sense of the word. See Dahlgaard, Kanji & Kristensen (1990).

There are no simple methods or tools by means of which we can work with culture and quality culture in practice. On the contrary, it must be recognized that it is very uncertain how and how deeply and systematically it is possible to work with these phenomena. When you work with concepts like corporate and quality culture you are in fact working with the subconsciousness of companies and organisms which is an extremely complicated phenomenon.

Earlier, we have used the expression assumption layers about these more deeply lying explanatory factors, and it was mentioned that not until it is possible to uncover and understand the quality-relevant parts of a company's culture is it possible to work with quality from overall points of view.

This has something to do with the fact that in practice--expressed in a simplified way-quality is a question of also looking at the horizontal processes and relations in a company and not just the vertical/functional ones. The horizontal perspective will be contained in and be an essential part of holistic thinking in practice in connection with the extended quality concept we are working with here.

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10 STEEN HILDEBRANDT ETAL.

We will now provide a brief account of a method for working with quality culture. Here the method is based on the assumption that the key question in connection with initiating and implementing total quality management in practice, i.e. in connection with the implementation of T Q M projects, is how to create in all employees quality consciousness in relation to real as well as experienced quality.

I t is believed that quality consciousness is achieved through visible results and actions with the individual employee. The prerequisites of creating this quality consciousness seem to be as follows.

(1) It is necessary to look at one's own quality situations through other people's observations, ideas and thoughts. Quality development must take place in a group situation where insight, experience and action can be created jointly.

(2) Every individual must be involved and motivated in such a way that the frame- work acts as an incentive to quality development, and gives the courage to make decisions and instil confidence into others with whom initiatives are taken.

(3) The ability to create quality can be developed by means of a mcthod going beyond the traditional problem-solving tools. This requires a willingness to work with quality questions in a deeper way, relying also on one's own attitudes and values. As a rule, quality levels are for a given technology the result of the norms, culture and expectations of individual employees.

(4) There must be a readiness to set aside time and means and to mobilize persons who have the possibility of deciding and implementing quality initiatives. It must be clear to the individual employee that a project is important to the company.

The work method to be indicated here is simple and has been used in practice in connection with quality work. The fundamental idea is that deep down in the value basis of an organization you find the source of understanding an organization's special way of acting and taking decisions. Within social ecology, the term is used about the basic atti- tudes, values and principles on which a company bases its day-to-day decisions and daily behaviour. If we introduce the concept quality policy in this context, we get that working with a company's quality policies is one of the ways in which we can work with quality culture in practice. Working with quality policies in this situation thus becomes part of the contents of total quality management. In relation to this special concept the policy concept represents the formally adopted rules, procedures, etc. for handling various questions and tasks in a company, but without necessarily living by them in practice.

With reference to the model in Fig. 3, we shall briefly outline the work method.

Field 0 : Observe present quality phenomena. Our starting point is questions relating to quality which in one way or the other live in the organization. You might say that in field 0 (as a person or group of persons) in a company you wonder what is happening (or not happening) in two ways:

-you wonder because you are curious to understand the quality situations and experiences, etc.

-you wonder because you wish to find a new practice in certain quality areas

It is important to note that at this level it is not a question of a formulated (and thus delimited) problem, but merely a question, i.e. openings. Questions open up, whereas even formulating a problem represents a delimitation.

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QUALITY CULTURE AND TQM 11

Values Find present values

This leads to observations. Experienced, observed situations, events that have taken place which a person can report about as fact. In principle it is all the types of situations in a company which in one way or the other are manifestations of quality dimensions.

In connection with a use of the work method, the activity in field 0 consists in reporting-for example in different group constellations--on these observed/experienced situations. The experiences are made as objective and vivid as possible. This is the com- pany's present reality, or part of it. In addition, it is these realized pictures which, when using this work method, ought to be the starting point for working with the quality questions existing in the company.

\

Field V : Findpresent values. FieldV is thenext activity in the work method. The activity consists in maintaining single pictures from field 0 and questions relating to the experi- ences. In other words, in this activity you penetrate behind the experiences and into the layers of ideas, principles, values and basic assumptions explaining the pictures. This is what in this context is called quality policies, which together form the whole or part of the company's quality culture. In practice, this activity-like the other phases/activities-will involve many people and require a considerable work effort which it is not possible, of course, generally to define more closely.

The result of working with the fields 0 and V is a number of statements or sentences characterizing the values surrounding quality existing in the company now.

Field P : Define future principles. The above is in itself valuable, but when put into a managerial context, there will-already against the background of the questions in field 0-hea wish for achange. Therefore, theactivity infieldV will typically be followed by an assessment of and decisions about the policies found, and subsequently, in field P, desir- able, future policies in the quality area are formulated, i.e. the desired changes in the company's quality culture are formulated. This is a work of visions that must be adapted to the company's other experiences of the future, fundamental ideas, etc. The result is some future-oriented policy-sentences representing wishes relating to future quality behaviour in the company. I t is of decisive importance to the result of the total process that the company carefully takes a position on whether these policies are something the company

Observations Observe present

quality phenomena

Principles Define future

principles

Figure 3. The culture cycle.

0-V-P-A

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12 STEEN HILDEBRANDT ETAL

Check P-D-C-A

Figure 4. The Denzing Cycle.

really wants to work for, including in particular whether it is attitudes that have the full support of management.

Field A: Act. The last part of the quality management process reflected by field A is partly a decision on whether a realization of the new quality policies requires fulfillment of some special conditions which do not exist in the organization today and partly a detailed decision on the concrete actions to be initiated next in order to work at changing the behaviour in the company in the direction of the new policies and maintaining those parts of the existing quality policies which it is regarded as desirable to maintain and possibly extend.

Quality culture, quality improvement, and TQM

It is a fact that the Deming Cycle has become the basic work method for quality improve- ment. I t consists of the phases shown in Fig. 4.

This well-known model is a typical system model which works very well within a given cultural structure. Traditionally, however, it does not deal with phenomena of culture and attitudes which means that it has a tendency to make the company stay within the given frames of culture and attitudes.

Considering the importance, we believe that cultureand attitudes have for the realised quality and productivity within a given system, we find it relevant to supplement the Deming Cycle with a culture side which continuously incorporates attitudes into the management of quality.

This can be done by superimposing theculture cycle of Fig. 3 on theDeming Cycle to create an expanded Deming Cycle. The result is shown in Fig. 5. The two cycles are connected in the action field, and the Deming Cycle is still the basic work method. In certain cases, however, the check activity will show so large a discrepancy that it is found necessary to consider a change in %he culture and attimdes of the company. In that case the action leads to entering the O-V-P-A-cycle. From this a new cultural framework concern- ing quality emerges, and the company is once again ready to use the P-D-C-A-cycle but on a new level.

As an example one could mention the well-known Nissan corporation. Nissan has been a pioneer within quality assurance activities, starting out, e.g. as early as 1966 with QCC activities. In spite of good quality performance, i.e. good use of the Deming Cycle, the company experienced profit problems in the middle of the 1980's that could not be handled within the traditional planning systems. A new top-management realized that the

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QUALITY CULTURE AND TQM 13

Figure 5. The expanded Deming Cycle.

culture surrounding quality had to be changed, and they entered into the phases described by our culture cycle. The result of this was a new definition of quality incorporated into an entirely new corporate philosophy:

'Our first commitment is to customer satisfaction. Through diligent efforts to develop new customers and expand our customer base, we are contributing to the ongoing progress and enrichment of society'.

This philosophy was communicated to the work force in different ways. Among other things the philosophy was printed on a small plastic card and distributed to every employee in the company.

According to Nissan the effect was tremendous. The culture of the company was changed dramatically, and Nissan was back in a stable Deming Cycle producing high quality goods but with a new definition of quality based on customer satisfaction. One notices that the main elements of this process have been the involvement of top manage- ment and the satisfaction of the customer which are the basic points given in the section on cultural change by Kanji (1990).

It will be seen that the expanded Deming Cycle demonstrates an important distinc- tion between traditional quality assurance and TQM. While QA usually operates within a given system framework, T Q M operates on all levels of the company including the attitudinal. It is, however, not a total TQM-cycle.

In order to make a total T Q M cycle the model has to be expanded in the same way as Kondo (1977) did with the traditional Deming Cycle. In what follows we pursue this idea in more detail.

One of the important characteristics of T Q M is the internal supplier-customer relationship. Each employee in the company has a lot of suppliers and a lot of customers

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Figure 6. The transfer o/Demi,rg'r Cycle ro 'lha do level'.

and each has to be treated as if he were an external supplier or an external customer. Each employee knows the quality levels of the suppliers and the demands from the customers and he is continually trying to improve the quality of his output in order to decrease 'the hidden factory' and to increase customers' satisfaction. Such a successful implementation needs time and resources and many companies will never reach that level. There are a lot of obstacles on the road and you have to remove each obstacle before you reach the goal 'TQM'.

'Creativity in daily work' (Kondo, 1977) is needed by each employee in order to remove all the road blocks. A necessary condition for creativity in daily work is that each supplier-customer relationship is controlled by its own Deming Cycle and for the vertical supplier-customer relationships, for example relations between top management and middle management, a transfer of a part of the Deming Cycle to the lower level is important. Such a transfer is described by Kondo as 'a transfer to the do level' and Fig. 6 shows the basic idea of the transfer.

Normally there areno problems in tranferring the Deming Cycle to a lower level when you consider the relations between top management and middle management. The prob- lems increase when you climb down the pyramid. Middle management too often act as dictators and are often not willing to transfer 'planning-checking-and action' activities to lower levels. However, management at all levels must understand that their employees are their customers. T o obtain this a 'rotation' in the culture cycle is needed. T h e expanded Deming Cycle has to be implemented in all the vertical customer-supplier relationships from the top to the bottom in order to change the quality culrure. Of course top manage- ment is responsible for a successful implementation of the expanded Deming cycles at the lower levels.

Regarding the horizontal customer-supplier relationships a rotation in the culture cycle may be needed from time to time in order to improve the results and in this way satisfying the customers.

From the above it is evident that a company which has successfully implemented TQM is characterized by a successful implementation of expanded Deming cycles at every level and in every customer-supplier relationship. Top management is responsible for such an implementation which is necessary for changing the quality culture of a company.

We believe that the proposed implementation strategy of the expanded Deming cycle has inherently an ability to change the quality culture. Through the implementation pro- cess both 'the group-dynamic factor' (Collin, 1988) and 'the internalized norms factor' will

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QUALITY CULTURE AND TQM 15

change the quality culture. The latter factor will gradually be effective when more 'P-C-A activities' are transferred to each employee. The former factor-the group dynamic factor-will immediately be effective when the network of supplier-customer relation- ships and the attached expanded Deming cycles are implemented. A successful imple- mentation requires that the total concept is understood, accepted and utilized in every customer-supplier relationship all over the company. Of course this is not possible without the understanding, acceptance and active participation of the top management.

Conclusion

Total quality management as management theory is a relatively new concept, whose delimitation and contents are somewhat vague. I t is assumed that total quality manage- ment may turn out to be one of the concepts within organizational theory which may raise management theory up to a new level of understanding, relevance and consciousness. As regards the culture concept, it seems justified-in the light of the above-to conclude that we are dealing with a concept which it may be expedient to continue to work with within the theory of quality management.

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation.

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