No abstract

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a widely used management philosophy across many sectors. Organisations implement TQM in order to gain competitive advantage in terms of quality, productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability. However, the literature seems inconclusive about the positive effect of TQM on organisational performance. Several studies argue that the effect of TQM practices on organisational performance need to be evaluated in different social, cultural, and economic settings. The effect of national culture on TQM implementation is also gaining importance. Therefore, this study provides empirical evidence from a developing country of South Asia. This study was conducted in the context of textile companies of Pakistan. The data was collected from the member companies of All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA) by using a questionnaire. The questionnaires were sent to 210 textile companies and the respondents were quality or production managers. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to investigate the relationship between TQM practices and organisational performance. The findings of this study indicate that TQM has a highly positive effect on organisational performance. These findings support the divergence argument which indicates that the positive effect of TQM on organisational performance is not limited only to the companies located in developed nations, but can also be equally achieved in the other parts of the world. All the TQM elements have positive relationship with financial and non-financial results. However, the element of people does not have significant relationship with financial and non-financial results.

Hospitals vary from one another in terms of their specialty, services offered, and resource availability. Their services are widely measured with scales that gauge patients’ perspective. Therefore, there is a need for research to develop a scale that measures hospital service quality in Asian hospitals, regardless of their nature or ownership. To address this research need, this study adapted the SERVQUAL instrument to develop a service quality measurement scale. Data were collected from inpatients and outpatients at 9 different hospitals, and the scale was developed using structural equation modeling. The developed scale was then validated by identifying service quality gaps and ranking the areas that require managerial effort. The findings indicated that all 5 dimensions of SERVQUAL are valid in Asian countries such as Pakistan, with 13 items retained. Reliability, tangibility, responsiveness, empathy, and assurance were ranked first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, respectively, in terms of the size of the quality gap. The gaps were statistically significant, with values ≤.05; therefore, hospital administrators must focus on each of these areas. By focusing on the identified areas of improvement, health care authorities, managers, practitioners, and decision makers can bring substantial change within hospitals.

There are core dimensions of healthcare service quality that are commonly found in all models used in current reviewed studies. We found a little difference in these core dimensions while focusing dimensions in both developed and developing countries, as mostly SERVQUAL is being used as the basic model to either generate a new one or to add further contextual dimensions. The current study ranked the contributing factors based on their frequency in literature. Based on these priorities, if factors are addressed irrespective of any context, may lead to contribute to improve healthcare quality and may provide an important information for evidence-informed decision-making.