Quality and Responsibility Management and Its Integration into Organizational Processes
The article titled Managing responsibility: What can be learned from the quality movement and written by Waddock and Bodwell (2004) sheds a lot of light on the issue of responsibility management, as well as the significance of corporate social responsibility within an organization in general.
According to the authors, it is imperative that proper tools for facilitating responsibility within an organization should be established; moreover, Waddock and Bodwell (2004) make it rather clear that the introduction of responsibility into the organization’s framework defines the quality of the product and the speed and efficacy of information transfer. In other words, the quality movement as the key driving factor behind the promotion of quality management defines the efficacy of organizations in the global economy environment.
The article, therefore, puts a very strong emphasis on the development of responsibility as the key to building a strong company with trusted relationships among its key members.
The theoretical framework of Total Quality Management (Waddock & Bodwell, 2004), or, as the authors call it, TQM is viewed by the authors as a probable solution to the key challenges that global organizations face when having to deal with the obstacles such as high competition rates, lack of enthusiasm among the target customers, absence of motivation among the staff, etc.: “In comparing emerging total responsibility management (TRM) approaches with existing total quality management (TQM) approaches, we focus on initial responses to managing quality” (Waddock & Bodwell, 2004, p. 36).
As a result, the approach implemented by the researchers allows for enhancing the overall performance of the company by promoting a set of more rigid quality standards and behavioral principles: “TRM approaches start with a vision that includes the company’s responsibilities to stakeholders and the natural environment” (Waddock & Bodwell, 2004).
Improving Responsibility Management by Improving Quality Management in Ford Motor Company
Despite the fact that responsibility of the company members and the quality of the product that the organization offers to its target customers are interrelated, the promotion of responsibility principles within an organization often happens to be quite challenging (Kiritharan, 2013). As a result, few companies have managed to promote the system in question successfully to its staff and integrate the principles of total responsibility management into its framework.
Among the organizations that managed to carry out the task in question, Ford Motor Company deserves to be listed. According to the statement made by the organization under analysis, TQM as a forefront in the organization’s design choices allowed for attracting an increasingly large amount of customers (Scheid & McDonough, 2011).
The given statement aligns with the basic principles of total quality management perfectly, as the latter presupposes that the approach to quality evaluation should embrace every single major process within the company (Waddock & Bodwell, 2004). It is worth mentioning, though, that Ford did not stop at installing the TQM system; in the course of its evolution, the organization has chosen to transfer from TQM to the Six Sigma approach.
Much to the credit of the Ford Company’s leaders, though, one must admit that the organization lacks the concept of responsibility in its framework substantially. Therefore, a stronger emphasis on the corporate values, including the need to excel in carrying out the routine tasks, needs to be introduced into the company as the basis for its future development. As long as the staff has a rigid set of moral and ethical standards to comply with, the quality of the product is likely to remain high.
Reference List
Kiritharan, G. (2013). Total Quality Management – A system to implement. New York, NY: Lulu.com.
Scheid, J. & McDonough, M. (2011). TQM and Ford Motor Company. Web.
Waddock, S. & Bodwell, B. (2004). Managing responsibility: What can be learned from the quality movement? California Management Review, 47(1), 25–37.