The Impacts of Quality System Integration and Relationship Quality on Quality Performance in Supply Chains: An Empirical Investigation in China

Product-safety incidents and recalls such as automobile recalls by Toyota and a recall of sausages by Shuanghui have raised many quality management challenges and attracted increasing attention from practitioners and academics researchers in recent years. Traditional quality management and quality function development can no longer effectively address these problems, with competition moving from the firm level to the supply chain level. In this study, a holistic supply chain quality management framework on the relationship between supply chain quality system integration, supply chain relationship quality, and quality performance is proposed to improve quality management and mitigate the risk of product recalls. Then a structural equation model is used to analyze these relationships. To test this model empirically, we use survey data from manufacturers in consumer electronics, food, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, and toys in China. Our results show that supply chain quality management can help companies achieve high quality. Further, quality system integration and relationship quality have significant impacts on the quality of design and of conformance and are positively related to supply chain quality performance.