The Adoption of Total Quality Management (TQM) in Dubai Manufacturing Firms

With the increasing competition in today’s business environment, firms are keen to seek every opportunity toimprove their business results. TQM has been a widely applied process for improving competitiveness aroundthe world. Many organizations claim to “have TQM”. This study attempted to develop a generic framework thatcan be used by the management and industrial practitioners to self-assess TQM implementation and initiatives intheir firms, and also, to self-assess and the extent to which firms indeed “have TQM”. Such a framework can beeffectively used by management to obtain a better understanding of their efforts toward TQM implementation,and to spot areas that must be targeted by managers for improvement to help the organization in its qualitymission and in identifying the level of training needed. The framework incorporated, interpreted andoperationalized the implicit concepts of TQM as proposed by TQM gurus, national and international qualityawards and three famous studies among the vast TQM literature. The reliability and validity of the proposedframework were tested and validated using the data obtained from 126 manufacturing firms working in Dubai –United Arab Emirates (UAE). The results indicated that manufacturing firms in Dubai moderately adopt theconstructs of TQM and there are no significant differences in TQM implementation among these firms accordingto their characteristics. The study showed clear patterns where firms stress certain TQM practices as; flexiblemanufacturing, employee empowerment and leadership, but they ignore other Practices like customer focus andbenchmarking. The importance of behavioral practices that are not implemented was highlighted in order to betaken as a serious signal by management