An Empirical Research On The Relationship Between Quality Management Practices And Firm Performance In Manufacturing Firm

Quality management is management philosophy or management methods made upof a set of mutually reinforcing theories, in which each theory has a variety of activitiesand technical as a support. Quality management practice is a whole set of managementpractices and initiatives for organizations to achieve quality management objectives,and has been widely adopted by the enterprises as a means of improving product qualityand enhancing the competitiveness of enterprises. Its development conforms to thedemand for the external environment changes in the whole hog. For the enterprises, theultimate goal of quality management is to achieve maximum benefit, and there is a verylarge relevance between quality management practices and firm performance. Recallingthe development history of quality management after our government’s reform andopening up process, quality management practices have experienced a number ofinnovations from State control to market promotion and from enterprises passive toinitiatives. In the context of increasingly fierce international competition, to survive anddevelop, enterprises need to constantly improve performance, increase marketcompetitiveness. To win the competition, improving quality management level for thosemanufacturing enterprises has been an important approach. Therefore, to explore therelationship between quality management practices and firm performance is of greatsignificance in the current social development.On the basis of literature at home and abroad, as well as existing theories, thispaper first proposes the research hypothesis between quality management practices andfirm performance, and establishes a conceptual model. Then, through the managersurveys from quality management or purchasing departments in USA and China, thispaper has collected sample data, and processes the data in terms of using statisticalsoftware such as SPSS20.0, LISREL8.70. Finally, this paper builds a relationship modelbetween quality management practices and firm performance through empiricalmethods of the questionnaire, regards customer orientation, leadership, teamcooperation, suppliers integration and time-based manufacturing practices as aframe-work of quality management practices，and also undertakes a study amongindicators of quality management practices. In the empirical part, all the researchhypothesis was tested, most of them have been validated, a few were denied. Theempirical research shows time-based manufacturing practices has direct positive effect on firm performance; customer orientation and team cooperation have indirect positiveeffect on firm performance; leadership and suppliers integration have both directpositive effect and indirect positive effect on firm performance; the indicators of qualitymanagement practices have cross influence with each other and suppliers integration ismost affected by the interaction.The last part of paper offers some proposals that quality management practices canimprove firm performance. The manufacturing firm can improve the performance in theterms of strengthening the rational leadership of managers, integrating the resourcesamong managers, stuff and suppliers, implementing green purchasing, and optimizingtime-based manufacturing practices. The main achievements of paper is to put forward aframework for quality management in manufacturing enterprises based on time-basedtheory, and validate that manufacturing enterprises samples in USA and China can beused as a big sample for the research by using one-way ANOVA and Scheffe method,which have some great reference for future research.