| The global business environment has become increasingly competitive over the past several decades. During this time, quality and services have surged in importance to competitors and consumers. Quality has become a necessary competitive priority for firms in most industries as customers demand higher quality products. Quality and services have become inextricably intertwined. Quality is important to service and service impacts the quality perceived by customers. This is due, in part, to the fact that quality and service are customer-driven.; This research is part of a theory-building process. The normal research cycle is an iterative process. Descriptive models are expanded into explanatory frameworks that are tested against reality. As research study builds upon research study, they are eventually developed into theories. The current study conceptually develops a quality-based operations management model that represents a realignment of the traditional production/operations management framework. It is a customer-driven quality-based approach to operations management decision-making. Quality is linked to each of the major operations management decisions. Based on this model, hypotheses pertaining to the centrality of quality in corporate decision-making are derived and tested. Quality is established as a central theme in corporate decision-making. This establishes the efficacy of continuing the research in the direction of developing a service-based quality taxonomy of firms.; Organizational attributes, commonly found in the literature, used to distinguish firms were examined from an empirical perspective. Those attributes found to distinguish firms were retained for further analysis. Regression analysis was then used to determine which of the organizational attributes were most influential to quality. Three organizational attributes were found to be most influential to quality. These attributes were customer-oriented, suggesting a service-based approach to quality. These service-oriented organizational attributes were then used to empirically derive the service-based quality taxonomy of firms. The results suggested four clusters of firms exist that exhibit similar characteristics with respect to the organizational attributes influential to quality. Future research should revolve around developing empirically tested prescriptive strategies for firms desiring to pursue quality as a competitive priority. These strategies should link the organizational attributes and operations management decisions to a customer-driven quality perspective. |
