Who achieves continuous improvement? TQM implementation in a global organisation

This study aims at clarifying how organisational and environmental characteristics affect the timing of adoption and especially the depth of the implementation of the innovation that improves operations management (TQM). While organisational applications of the theory of innovation diffusion usually concentrate on explaining variations in adoption across organisations, this study explains the implementation phase within one organisation. The developed model for measuring depth of implementation adds value to the paper. A model is built based on the theory of innovation diffusion, and subsequently tested on the following dataset collected from a global process-industry company: 1) a longitudinal data of the continual improvement process; 2) a survey data from 493 respondents. According to our results, timing of adoption has an effect on the depth of the organisational innovation and the developed model for studying the depth worked well. The organisational characteristics had varying effects on the adoption and on the depth of the implementation. Formalisation assists the innovation implementation while interconnectedness, empowering leadership or position in the value chain did not have an effect.