View article

From manufacturing to service, many US organizations are implementing total quality programs (Lawler, Mohrman, & Ledford, 1992). In one recent survey of Fortune 1000 companies, Lawler et al.(1992) found that a full 76% of the respondents reported that their company used total quality with at least some employees. Indeed, in the past several years a focus on quality improvement has swept through American industry, transforming the way that many companies do business (MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity, 1989). Despite this tide of change, academic researchers have been quiescent almost to the point of negligence. There has been very little research focusing on the concept of total quality management (Dean & Bowen, 1994). The focus of this chapter is to use the concepts of politics and support to understand and predict the effectiveness of quality improvement teams. As we shall see, this will require that we conceptualize politics and support a little differently. Previously, research has examined social climate perceptions from the perspective of the individual. We develop a model of social climate that considers both the team and the organizational level. First, however, we need to outline what total quality improvement is about.