Research On The Influencing Of Oualitv Management Practices On The Organization Performance:the Perspective Of Market Orientation

The prevalent business environment is highly competitive and is characterized by such norms as the globalization, cut throat competition, deregulation of markets, and the rising demands and expectations of customers. To compete and survive in the fiercely competitive global market place, firms have to pay more attention to the needs of customers as competition intensifies, and offer them quality products or services to satisfy their increasing expectations. They must innovate business operations in every aspect constantly, for continuous improvement of the products. Therefore, they need a strategy that aligns the organization with the stakeholders, and a management system that facilitates the continuous improvement of every facet of their operations. Firms must recognize the pursuit of desirable outcomes through these efforts as their critical management objective.Quality management practices (QMP) have been a widely applied for improving competitiveness, but the conclusion was complex and controversial. Studying the impact of quality management practices on organization performance, and market orientation (MO) on organization performance has been popular research topics in recent years. Although both quality management practices and market orientation share the same objectives and are considered complementary business approaches (Lai&Weerakoon,1998), there is a lack of empirical research studying the two constructs and their relationship with organization performance. This study therefore fills this lacuna and contributes to the extant literature by incorporating market orientation in quality management practices and performance relationship within the context of China, exploring the relationship between quality management practices, market orientation and organization performance.On a sample of172Manufacturing firms, EFA and CFA were applied to empirically validate and verify the dimensions of quality management practice, market orientation, and organization performance. Correlation analysis was performed to determine whether QMP is associated with MO and a firm’s performance. A measurement scale with six dimensions of quality management practice, three dimensions of market orientation and three dimensions of organization performance was formed. Finally, the stepwise regression analysis was used to substantiate the proposed hypotheses, and the results indicate that: (1) Qality management practices consist of two dimensons, namely infrastructural practices and core practices. Infrastructural practices include leadership commitment, customer orientation and employee involvement, and core practices include product design, process management, statistics control and feedback.(2) Both infrastructural practices and core practices have a significant positive effect on product quality and operation performance. Besides, core practices affect business performance significantly, while the relationship between infrastructural practices and business performance was not found.(3) Infrastructural practices affect quality performance, operation performance and business performance through market orientation, and similarily, core practices affect product quality, operational performance and business performance through market orientation.The practical implication is that, companies should consider both infrastructural practices and core practices as an integrated facilitating management tool for improving organization performance in relatively more dynamic environments. As both infrastructural practices and core practices contribute to the level of MO, firms that implement quanlity management practices are thought to have taken marketing concept and are able to achieve better performance. As increasing number of Companies are being involved in global markets, a double track approach (QMP implementation at functional level and MO at business level) to improve product and management quality becomes inevitable.This paper provides a new perspective of how quality management practices affect organization performance, extending the quality management research from internal activities into a wider external environment as customers, market and etc. This is an expansion of the research on quality management, as well as groundwork for the future research.