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Critical issues for TQM implementation in higher education

Mete B. Sirvanci
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Mohammad S. Owlia, Elaine M. Aspinwall, (1997),"TQM in higher education - a review", International Journal of Quality &
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TQM implementation
Critical issues for TQM
implementation in
higher education
Mete B. Sirvanci
Downloaded by Middle Tennessee State University At 10:43 22 March 2015 (PT)
The author
Mete B. Sirvanci is a Professor in the College of Business and
Economics, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, Wisconsin,
USA.
Keywords
Higher education, Total quality management, Leadership,
Culture (sociology), Customers, Students
Abstract
While total quality management has been adopted by many
organizations world-wide, its implementation in non-profit
organizations, such as higher education institutions, presents
more challenges and difficulties than those encountered in
business organizations. A critical step in TQM implementation is
the process of customer identification. In addition to customer
identification, there are other issues such as leadership, cultural,
and organizational issues that tend to create difficulties for TQM
implementation in higher education. These issues along with the
role of students from a quality perspective and performance
measures for higher education are discussed, and suggestions
are made for their resolution.
Electronic access
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www.emeraldinsight.com/0954-478X.htm
The TQM Magazine
Volume 16 · Number 6 · 2004 · pp. 382-386
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0954-478X
DOI 10.1108/09544780410563293
382
Introduction
Total quality management (TQM) has been
adopted as a management paradigm by many
organizations worldwide. Quality movement in
almost every country usually starts with quality
improvement projects at manufacturing
companies. TQM, as this paradigm is now called,
spreads later to service companies such as banks
and insurance companies, and eventually to non-
profit organizations such as health care,
government, and education institutions. TQM
models, based on the teachings of quality gurus,
generally involve a number of “principles” or
“essential elements” such as top management’s
leadership, teamwork, customer focus, employee
involvement, training, continuous improvement
tools and several other elements, which are all
required for successful TQM implementation. In
fact, many prominent quality awards, such as
Deming in Japan, Malcolm Baldrige in the USA
and the European Quality Award, have adopted
these essential elements of TQM as their award
criteria.
While higher education institutions are the
home for learning and create knowledge through
their research function, it is ironic that they have
been lagging behind other organizations in
embracing and implementing TQM. This inertia
in the adoption of TQM seems to be due to certain
structural and traditional characteristics of higher
education institutions. There are also some special
challenges that are not encountered in other
organizations. Some of these characteristics which
cause difficulties in TQM implementation are
discussed in this article. Quality in higher
education is treated from different perspectives in
other articles in the literature. For example,
measurement and evaluation of quality in higher
education are studied in Grant (2002), Tranter
(2001), and Bennett (2001). On the other hand,
Owlia and Aspinwall (1996) discuss the findings of
a survey conducted to examine the different views
on the applicability of industrial quality
management principles to higher education.
Leadership
Top management’s leadership is one of the
essential elements of TQM. In every country
where TQM has been implemented, there are
examples of company executives who have
initiated the cultural change and carried their
organizations through the quality journey. Quite
different from the CEOs of business organizations,
presidents and chancellors of higher education
institutions do not enjoy ultimate authority in
 Critical issues for TQM implementation in higher education
Mete B. Sirvanci
hiring and firing of personnel and allocating
resources. For example, in US public universities,
a shared governance system where faculty shares
the administration of university matters with the
president and the deans is in effect. This type of
shared governance leads to diffusion of authority
and responsibility, and, as a result, the top
administration lacks the authority to undertake
drastic measures and changes in higher education
institutions. University presidents and chancellors,
as leaders, can naturally set goals, organizational
values, and performance expectations. However,
since they lack the necessary authority, it is difficult
for them to deploy these values and goals through
the layers of the higher education institutions.
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Cultural and organizational
transformation
A set of issues that encompasses a number of
TQM elements may be discussed under cultural
transformation. Organizations that have adopted
TQM have transformed their institution’s culture
into a total quality culture that involves elements
such as teamwork, customer and market focus,
employee involvement and participation, and
process management.
Higher education institutions have deep-rooted
traditions, dating back several centuries, which
cause them to resist change. For example,
universities and colleges are organized into
departmental units based on academic disciplines.
In adopting the TQM culture, organizations need
to move from a product focus to a market focus.
However, the primary loyalty of faculty,
particularly research faculty, is their academic
field. Market requirements for their students are of
secondary importance for them. This product
focus is true in general, but to a lesser extent for the
faculties of professional schools such as business
and engineering.
Organizationally, higher education institutions
are based on a strong departmental model. The
departmental structure is further reinforced by the
fact that tenure and promotion decisions for
faculty are initiated by the departments, and the
departments compete with each other for
university resources. As a result of the strong
departmental organization, implementation of
horizontal (or process) management, which
involves desirable practices such as
interdepartmental team teaching and cooperation
among departments for curriculum development,
becomes difficult.
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Volume 16 · Number 6 · 2004 · 382-386
Customer identification
Among the essential elements of TQM, customer
focus is probably the most important, as reflected
by the weight assigned to it by various quality
award criteria. In fact, customer satisfaction is
often used synonymously with quality, and quality
is frequently defined as meeting and exceeding
customer expectations. One of the critical steps in
TQM implementation is the step of customer
identification, where current and potential
customers of an organization are determined.
Customer focus provides the direction and targets
for improvement efforts, and customers and the
market are the driving forces for quality efforts.
As higher education institutions adopt the
TQM paradigm and initiate continuous
improvement, the customer identification step at
these institutions seems to present more difficulties
than are encountered in business organizations.
Among the main groups within the higher
education institutions – namely faculty, students,
and administrators – there is not much agreement
on who the customers are. While most
administrators tend to perceive students as the
customers of faculty in the classroom, many
faculty staff resent this metaphor as being too
commercial. For example, in an effort to identify
their customers, the quality council of a university
generated a long list including students, parents,
alumni, employers, society, faculty, local
community, academic disciplines, and staff. While
this looks like a complete list, some of the groups in
the list are more like stakeholders than customers
and, perhaps, customers of secondary processes,
rather than the primary process (i.e. education of
undergraduates) of the institution. Without a well-
defined customer and a customer focus, quality
efforts may easily be diffused.
Students’ role
While in some higher education TQM models
students are treated as customers, their role as
customers is a debatable issue. It is clear that
higher education institutions are service
organizations, but a closer look at their operation
reminds us the flow of products in a production
plant. Figure 1 depicts the flow of students through
a higher education institution. The analogy with a
typical manufacturing organization is immediate.
Once admitted, students move through the various
courses required for a degree as raw material flows
through the successive stages of the manufacturing
process. As the finished product carries the brand
name and label of the manufacturer, graduating
students are issued with diplomas certifying that all
 Critical issues for TQM implementation in higher education
Mete B. Sirvanci
Figure 1 Student flow in higher education
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the requirements for their degree have been
completed. In the context of the production
analogy, university graduates compete for jobs just
as brands and products compete for customers in
the market place. Thus, Figure 1 suggests that
graduates may be interpreted as the finished
product, and that employers are the customers of
higher education institutions. Other components
of this production analogy are given in Table I.
Among service organizations, higher education
institutions are probably unique in yielding a
production analogy. In fact, this analogy may be
very useful in implementing TQM in higher
education, since TQM has been most successful in
manufacturing organizations.
However, unlike manufacturing companies, in
universities and colleges students have other roles
besides their product roles. In a comprehensive
effort, Sirvanci (1996) identified four different
roles for students. According to Sirvanci (1996),
depending on the process under study, students
take on one of the following four roles within the
higher education institutions:
(1) Product-in-process – At the institutional level,
i.e. the macro level, the production analogy
model illustrated in Figure 1 and Table I is the
Table I Production analogy for higher education
Higher education Production
Secondary schools Suppliers
Admitted high school graduates Raw material
Student Product-in-process
Courses Process stages
Graduate Finished product
Employers Customers
Number of graduates employed Sales
Number of graduates unemployed Unsold product (inventory)
Starting salary Price
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Volume 16 · Number 6 · 2004 · 382-386
proper model. This model implies that the
degree seeking students are the “product-in-
process”. They are the “raw material” when
admitted and the “finished product” when
they graduate.
(2) Internal customers for facilities – Students are
the “internal customers”, in fact, paying
customers for many campus facilities and
services such as dormitories, food services,
bookstores, libraries, sport facilities, registrar,
and others. These non-academic facilities
contribute indirectly to the quality of the
institution’s product by helping to attract
better students, providing a more satisfactory
campus climate, and also by supporting
academic programs.
(3) Laborers in the learning process – This role was
first identified by Sirvanci (1996) as one of the
dual roles of the student in the classroom. In
Harmon (1993), Glasser also suggested that
students, though not technically employees,
are more like lower-level employees. This role
evolves because, contrary to typical service
customers, students, as they receive service
(knowledge) from their instructors, are
expected simultaneously to work and exert
effort in order to learn the material by various
means such as completing projects, term
papers, and preparing for tests. The laborer
role seems to be unique to the students and
because of this role, the education process is
different from other service industries.
(4) Internal customers for the delivery of course
material – This is the other component of the
student’s dual role in the classroom. In fact,
most people have this role in mind when they
think of students as customers.
From the multiple role descriptions above, it
should be clear why customer identification in
 Critical issues for TQM implementation in higher education
Mete B. Sirvanci
higher education is a complicated and confusing
issue. Since various groups who are involved with
this issue seem to treat only one dimension of the
problem rather than the whole, they usually infer a
single label for students. In fact, when the Baldrige
Education Criteria were first developed during the
mid to late 1990s by adapting the performance
criteria for business organizations to education
institutions, it further blurred the customer issue
with the substitution of student satisfaction for the
customer satisfaction criterion. Although the word
“customer” was never used, this substitution
implied that students are to be considered as
customers.
The most recent version of the Baldrige
Education Criteria has clarified the confusion
created by the initial version. The 2002 Baldrige
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Education Criteria (Baldrige National Quality
Program, 2002) assigns the largest percentage (20
percent) of points to the “student learning results”
criterion (criterion 7.1 in Baldrige National
Quality Program, 2002) instead of student
satisfaction. This newer interpretation of the
student’s role agrees well with the product role
(and the finished product for graduates) described
above in connection with the production analogy.
The production analogy implies that, as all other
organizations do, higher education institutions are
expected to improve the quality of their products
(i.e. students). More than student satisfaction,
employers’ appraisal of the graduates which is, in
fact, a surrogate for society’s satisfaction, is a valid
performance measure in this case.
Representing the importance of higher
education institutions for general society, the
production analogy depicts the fundamental role
of the student. However, the other roles of the
student should not be ignored. For example,
students’ effort and work through their laborer role
are essential as a principal input for the quality of
the institution’s product, namely its graduates. To
be successful in this role, in addition to exerting
effort, students need to have the necessary skills,
disposition, and motivation. These factors are
similar to the human resource issues that
businesses face and deal with when they attempt to
improve the productivity of their employees.
Higher education may borrow ideas and methods
from businesses to improve the output of their
students.
The dual of the laborer role is the internal
customer for the delivery of course material. To
improve this component of classroom teaching,
the best available source for feedback information
is the students taking the class. Students’
evaluation of course delivery and students’
satisfaction are appropriate measures of
performance in this case. However, because of the
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Volume 16 · Number 6 · 2004 · 382-386
dual roles of the student, this source needs to be
used with caution so as not to affect course content
adversely. The overlap between delivery and
content may cause students to perceive the volume
and difficulty of course material as poor
performance in delivery. In fact, critics of student
evaluations argue that demanding higher
standards for students often results in lower
evaluations, with the inevitable result that
achievement levels are compromised. As a result,
questionnaires for the measurement of satisfaction
need to be very specific, designed to measure only
the delivery aspects of the course.
A different aspect of the customer issue, one
which is not related to customer identification, is
customer loyalty. In businesses, customer loyalty is
very important because repeat buying by loyal
customers has a direct effect on profitability.
However, higher education is a “once in a lifetime”
activity. If students are considered as customers,
this concept makes sense only when they make
donations as alumni. However, if employers are
the customers, repeat purchase means recruiting at
the same universities and colleges every year.
Conclusion
Higher education institutions have been facing
challenges for some time and are expected to face
more in the future. While many business
organizations have become leaner and more
efficient as a result of the adoption of TQM, higher
education institutions have not been affected by
this trend to as great an extent. Similar to the rise
in health care costs, the cost of higher education
has been increasing steadily. These are some of the
factors that are creating pressure on higher
education institutions to change and become more
efficient.
There are, however, examples of successful
application of TQM principles and methods in
many universities worldwide. In fact, for the first
time in 2002, a higher education institution,
University of Wisconsin-Stout, won the Baldrige
education award. Some of the implementations of
TQM principles in higher education have been
confined to the administrative branches and non-
academic processes of universities. On the
academic side, some departments, for example,
have used QFD (quality function deployment) for
curriculum development and improvement.
Advisory councils have been established for
departments and colleges with the goal of receiving
input information regarding the market demand
for their graduates. Such an effort is definitely an
example of customer and market focus. However,
most of these applications have been somewhat
 Critical issues for TQM implementation in higher education
Mete B. Sirvanci
narrow in scope and have not advanced beyond a
quality project application. The issues discussed
here under the headings “Leadership” and
“Cultural and organizational transformation” are
some of the reasons hindering institution-wide
implementation. Similar issues were encountered
in University of Wisconsin-Stout’s TQM
implementation, and are discussed in Daniels
(2002). Pennsylvania State University’s efforts
towards quality improvement are presented in
Everett (2002).
In implementing TQM in higher education, one
needs to realize that higher education is different
from other service industries, and depending on
how customers are identified, the performance
measure for the organization and processes under
study are profoundly affected. As discussed above,
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students have multiple roles and their roles cannot
be simplified to that of a customer. Advances in
technology have also been affecting higher
education. Videotaped lectures, the use of
multimedia in teaching and the emergence of
“distance learning” are changing education
processes structurally, and are reducing the role of
traditional classroom teaching. TQM can clearly
help in these turbulent times: however, university
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The TQM Magazine
Volume 16 · Number 6 · 2004 · 382-386
administrators and boards of trustees need to
overcome the issues discussed in this article.
References
Baldrige National Quality Program (2002), Education Criteria for
Performance Excellence, Baldrige National Quality
Program, National Institute of Standards and Technology,
Gaithersburg, MD.
Bennett, D.C. (2001), “Assessing quality in higher education”,
Liberal Education, Vol. 87 No. 2, pp. 40-6.
Daniels, S.E. (2002), “First to the top”, Quality Progress, Vol. 35
No. 5, pp. 41-53.
Everett, C.L. (2002), “Penn State’s commitment to quality
improvement”, Quality Progress, Vol. 35 No. 1, pp. 44-8.
Grant, D.M. (2002), “Measuring the dimensions of quality in
higher education”, Total Quality Management, Vol. 13
No. 1, pp. 123-32.
Harmon, M. (1993), “An interview with Dr William Glasser”,
Quality Digest, September, pp. 44-7.
Owlia, M.S. and Aspinwall, E.M. (1996), “Quality in higher
education: a survey”, Total Quality Management, Vol. 7
No. 2, pp. 161-72.
Sirvanci, M. (1996), “Are students the true customers of higher
education?”, Quality Progress, Vol. 29 No. 10, pp. 99-102.
Tranter, P. (2001), “Measuring quality in higher education: a
competency approach”, Quality in Higher Education, Vol. 7
No. 3, pp. 191-9.
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