The role of participative management in the implementation of total quality management programs

Proponents of Total Quality Management (TQM) programs are in agreement about the importance of participative management techniques for successful implementation of TQM. In this paper a framework for analyzing participative management is presented and used to examine twenty case studies of TQM, drawn from the academic literature. The analysis indicated that participative management techniques have a very limited role in TQM implementation. In most of the organizations studied, employees only participate in the ongoing maintenance of a TQM program, usually through team membership. Even this restricted use of participative management results in improved productivity as measured by objective standards in these firms.