Assessing the Impact of Total Quality Management on Innovation in Palestinian Food Industries رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

The globalization, changeable business environment, and increasing market competition entice the manufacturing sector to implement total quality management (TQM) to achieve the desired competitive advantage. On the other hand, the sustainable competitive advantage requires not only implementing TQM but also fostering innovation performance. Thus, organizations aim to attain high quality as well as high innovation capability at the same time. Many scholars have addressed the relationship between TQM and innovation; some scholars revealed a positive relationship, while others indicated a negative relationship. This study aims to reveal the impact of TQM practices, namely, customer focus, leadership, people involvement, process approach, systematic approach to management, continuous improvement, factual approach to decision making, and mutual beneficial suppliers’ relations on innovation; specifically, product innovation, process innovation, organizational innovation, and marketing innovation in the Palestinian food industries. To this end, perceptions of top management on TQM and innovation were collected via an online questionnaire. The questionnaire was designed and distributed to a random sample of 75 registered food industries. Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was employed to analyse the collected data. The results revealed that TQM implementation in Palestinian food firms as a general has a strong positive relationship with innovation which confirms the previous arguments about the positive relationship between TQM and innovation. However, the individual principles of TQM differ in their impact on innovation types. More specifically, people involvement principle was found to have a positive impact on both process and organizational innovations; whereas process approach and systematic approach to management principles were found to positively impact organizational innovation. In addition, the mutual beneficial suppliers’ relations principle was found to positively impact marketing innovation. On the other hand, none of the TQM principles was found to have any significant impact on product innovation. Also, the principles VI of customer focus, leadership, continuous improvement and factual approach to decision making were found to have no impact on any type of innovation, thus, the managers of the Palestinian food firms have not to look at TQM as a means to improve quality only, but also as a means to encourage and reinforce the innovation via effectively deploying these practices to foster the innovation. Therefore, the study implies that the effective implementation of TQM is highly required to attain a significant innovation. Palestinian food firms are recommended to grant special attention to product innovation to introduce new products to meet the changeable needs of customers. More precisely, fostering product innovation not only requires implementing TQM but also allocating the resources, thereby, the top management should bear the responsibility of allocating resources for product innovation. Besides, Palestinian food firms are recommended to address the obstacles and the constraints that hinder utilizing TQM practices to reinforce the innovation.