IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jemstr/v5y1996i1p69-106.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Who Adopts Total Quality Management (TQM): Theory and An Empirical Test

Author

Listed:
  • John M. Barron
  • Kathy Paulson Gjerde

Abstract

The recent emergence of total quality management (TQM) in the U.S. has spawned a great deal of interest in management circles as well as in the mass media. However, despite the growing number of firms that have adopted this management technique, few formal tests exist concerning the pattern of adoption as well as the changes that accompany the adoption of TQM. This paper contrasts models of production for TQM and non‐TQM firms in order to explore reasons why some firms but not others have adopted the TQM approach to quality improvement. Predictions arising from such a comparison are tested using a unique data set that combines data on firms from three different sources. Our findings tend to support the proposed theory of systematic differences between firms that find it advantageous to adopt TQM and firms that do not. We also find evidence that firms adopting TQM experience greater growth in sales, employment, and capital stock.

Suggested Citation

  • John M. Barron & Kathy Paulson Gjerde, 1996. "Who Adopts Total Quality Management (TQM): Theory and An Empirical Test," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(1), pages 69-106, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jemstr:v:5:y:1996:i:1:p:69-106
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1430-9134.1996.00069.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1430-9134.1996.00069.x
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1430-9134.1996.00069.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Sharon Oster, 1982. "The Diffusion of Innovation among Steel Firms: The Basic Oxygen Furnace," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 13(1), pages 45-56, Spring.
    2. Steven Shavell, 1979. "Risk Sharing and Incentives in the Principal and Agent Relationship," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 10(1), pages 55-73, Spring.
    3. Nancy L. Rose & Paul L. Joskow, 1990. "The Diffusion of New Technologies: Evidence from the Electric Utility Industry," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 21(3), pages 354-373, Autumn.
    4. Myers, Stewart C. & Majluf, Nicholas S., 1984. "Corporate financing and investment decisions when firms have information that investors do not have," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 187-221, June.
    5. Holmstrom, Bengt & Milgrom, Paul, 1987. "Aggregation and Linearity in the Provision of Intertemporal Incentives," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 55(2), pages 303-328, March.
    6. Grossman, Sanford J & Hart, Oliver D, 1983. "An Analysis of the Principal-Agent Problem," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 51(1), pages 7-45, January.
    7. Bengt Holmstrom, 1979. "Moral Hazard and Observability," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 10(1), pages 74-91, Spring.
    8. Itoh, Hideshi, 1991. "Incentives to Help in Multi-agent Situations," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(3), pages 611-636, May.
    9. HOLMSTROM, Bengt, 1979. "Moral hazard and observability," LIDAM Reprints CORE 379, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    10. Timothy H. Hannan & John M. McDowell, 1984. "The Determinants of Technology Adoption: The Case of the Banking Firm," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 15(3), pages 328-335, Autumn.
    11. Martin Gaynor, 1989. "The presence of moral hazard in budget breaking," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 61(3), pages 261-267, June.
    12. Stiglitz, Joseph E & Weiss, Andrew, 1981. "Credit Rationing in Markets with Imperfect Information," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(3), pages 393-410, June.
    13. Casey Ichniowski, 1990. "Human Resource Management Systems and the Performance of U.S. Manufacturing Businesses," NBER Working Papers 3449, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Levin, Sharon G & Levin, Stanford L & Meisel, John B, 1987. "A Dynamic Analysis of the Adoption of a New Technology: The Case of Optical Scanners," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 69(1), pages 12-17, February.
    15. Harris, Milton & Raviv, Artur, 1979. "Optimal incentive contracts with imperfect information," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 20(2), pages 231-259, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Paulson Gjerde, Kathy A. & Slotnick, Susan A., 2004. "Quality and reputation: The effects of external and internal factors over time," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(1), pages 1-20, May.
    2. Adams, Mike, 1999. "Determinants of ISO accreditation in the New Zealand manufacturing sector," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 285-292, April.
    3. Nelson P. Repenning, 2002. "A Simulation-Based Approach to Understanding the Dynamics of Innovation Implementation," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 13(2), pages 109-127, April.
    4. Nelson P. Repenning, 2000. "Drive out Fear (Unless You Can Drive It in): The Role of Agency and Job Security in Process Improvement," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 46(11), pages 1385-1396, November.
    5. Barron, John M & Gjerde, Kathy Paulson, 1997. "Peer Pressure in an Agency Relationship," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 15(2), pages 234-254, April.
    6. A.M. Lima, Marcos & Resende, Marcelo & Hasenclever, Lia, 2000. "Quality certification and performance of Brazilian firms: An empirical study," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(2), pages 143-147, June.
    7. Lima, Marcos A. M. & Resende, Marcelo & Hasenclever, Lia, 2004. "Skill enhancement efforts and firm performance in the Brazilian chemical industry: An exploratory canonical correlation analysis--research note," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(2), pages 149-155, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bartsch, Elga, 1996. "Enforcement of environmental liability in the case of uncertain causality and asymmetric information," Kiel Working Papers 755, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    2. Fangruo Chen, 2000. "Sales-Force Incentives and Inventory Management," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 2(2), pages 186-202, February.
    3. Kim, Son Ku & Wang, Susheng, 1998. "Linear Contracts and the Double Moral-Hazard," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 82(2), pages 342-378, October.
    4. Eduard Marinov, 2016. "The 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics," Economic Thought journal, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences - Economic Research Institute, issue 6, pages 97-149.
    5. Gang-Zhi Fan & Seow Ong & Tien Sing, 2006. "Moral Hazard, Effort Sensitivity and Compensation in Asset-Backed Securitization," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 32(3), pages 229-251, May.
    6. Son Ku Kim, 1990. "Efficiency of an Information System in an Agency Model," UCLA Economics Working Papers 608, UCLA Department of Economics.
    7. Greg Hallman & Jay C. Hartzell, 1999. "Optimal Compensation Contracts with Pay-For-Performance and Termination Incentives," New York University, Leonard N. Stern School Finance Department Working Paper Seires 99-053, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business-.
    8. Jean‐Jacques Laffont, 1989. "A Brief Overview of the Economics of Incomplete Markets," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 65(1), pages 54-65, March.
    9. Chaigneau, Pierre & Edmans, Alex & Gottlieb, Daniel, 2018. "Does improved information improve incentives?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(2), pages 291-307.
    10. Hilmer, Michael, 2013. "Fiscal treatment of managerial compensation - a welfare analysis," VfS Annual Conference 2013 (Duesseldorf): Competition Policy and Regulation in a Global Economic Order 79703, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    11. Asunur Cezar & Huseyin Cavusoglu & Srinivasan Raghunathan, 2014. "Outsourcing Information Security: Contracting Issues and Security Implications," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 60(3), pages 638-657, March.
    12. Florian Hoffmann & Roman Inderst & Marcus Opp, 2021. "Only Time Will Tell: A Theory of Deferred Compensation [Motivating Innovation in Newly Public Firms]," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 88(3), pages 1253-1278.
    13. Calcagno, R., 2000. "Is Leverage Effective in Increasing Performance Under Managerial Moral Hazard?," Other publications TiSEM 119da195-15e9-4467-a51b-c, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    14. Bengt Holmstrom, 1999. "Managerial Incentive Problems: A Dynamic Perspective," NBER Working Papers 6875, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Dirk Yandell, 1988. "Audit Information and Incentives for Efficiency," The American Economist, Sage Publications, vol. 32(1), pages 49-58, March.
    16. Rainer Niemann, 2011. "Asymmetric Taxation and Performance-Based Incentive Contracts," CESifo Working Paper Series 3363, CESifo.
    17. Christopher S. Armstrong & David F. Larcker & Che-Lin Su, 2010. "Endogenous Selection and Moral Hazard in Compensation Contracts," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 58(4-part-2), pages 1090-1106, August.
    18. Alex Edmans & Xavier Gabaix, 2016. "Executive Compensation: A Modern Primer," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 54(4), pages 1232-1287, December.
    19. Shasikanta Nandeibam, 1994. "A free-rider problem with a free-riding principal," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 1(1), pages 227-250, December.
    20. Julan Du & Charles Ka Yui Leung & Derek Chu, 2014. "Return Enhancing, Cash-rich or simply Empire-Building? An Empirical Investigation of Corporate Real Estate Holdings," International Real Estate Review, Global Social Science Institute, vol. 17(3), pages 301-357.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jemstr:v:5:y:1996:i:1:p:69-106. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/research/journals/JEMS/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.