Predictive Model of Total Quality Management (Tqm)

PREDICTIVE MODEL OF TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM)

FOR EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Alfredo Mosende Dimaano, DBM

Dean of the GraduateSchool

St. Paul UniversityPhilippines

TuguegaraoCity

ABSTRACT

Education has to be about quality and excellence. The quality and excellence that the educational institutions, particularly higher education institutions, aim to achieve is a transformed way of being in the world - not just the accumulation of facts, knowledge, and skills, and being at par. It is rather the quality of presence they share with their students, teachers, and stakeholders; and the quality of relationships they shared with each other-systems and subsystems, strategies, procedures, attitudes, and beliefs.

While Total Quality Management seemed to be the most appropriate paradigm for industry, the autocratic undertones were neither easily applicable, nor endearing to academic professionals. At this same time, new competition from the professional and for-profit sector, and increased public demand for measurable productivity, compounded by drastic reductions in government funds, led higher education scholars to identify, define, and ultimately weigh the benefits of applying quality and assessment principles to the profession of education. Some emphasize that reports such as Integrity in the College Curriculum by the Association of American Colleges in 1985, Involvement in Learning from the National Institute of Education in 1984, and Time for Results published by The National Governor’s Association in 1986 were specifically written to urge higher education to accept the mantra of quality, increase curricular coherence (Ewell, 1991), and provide for a standardized assessment of exactly what students are able to do that they weren’t able to do before as a result of their education (Banta, 1996).

Still, institutions of higher education relied on their own version of quality control. The resource orientation (Seymour, 1993), while not a mechanism for addressing the changing external environment of education, holds that the quality of an institution of higher education can be determined by its internal resources: the number of books in the library, the number of faculty with terminal degrees, size of the endowment, reputation, etc. However, internal measures of quality were no longer the primary measures of satisfaction demanded by increasingly discerning higher education consumers. “It has become evident that students, the primary customers of the institution, need and want more than library books and an impressive set of faculty degrees enumerated at the end of the college catalog” (Seymour, 1993). Though this view of assessing quality is a traditional and defining characteristic of higher education, some institutions began to yield to a performance view of excellence in education motivated by increased competition, soaring costs, external calls for accountability, and an acknowledgment of education’s service orientation. This means that the quality of an institution of higher education can be determined by its definable and assessable outputs - efficient use of resources, producing uniquely educated, highly satisfied and employable graduates, for example. This view is popularly termed the value added (Astin, 1991) approach to determining quality in higher education. This approach stresses agreeing upon, teaching, and measuring a set of student competencies that should be gained through a baccalaureate education (Bennett, 2001).

It is reasonable to posit, then, that the increasing external pressure for higher education to comply with what is characterized by some as a yet another management fad (Birnbaum, 2000) is being felt by all those inside the walls of the academy. While there is a sufficient amount of information on the quantitative aspects of quality and outcomes assessment in business, the fact that there is only a small amount of empirical data on how academic professionals perceive it necessitates further documentation.

The purpose of this study was not to evaluate the means or methods by which outcomes assessment and quality are being enacted in higher education, or take sides in the raging government policy debate on institutional accountability and efficiency, but rather to describe the reactions, feelings, and perceptions of one particular institutions internal stakeholders to the increasingly shrill rhetoric on such topics. The present research sought to provide a voice for current faculty and administrators who will be responsible for implementing these renewed calls for assessing educational quality: specifically, their perceptions of the value, challenges, opportunities, and frustrations involved. Finding that voice means finding an institution who was struggling to fully embrace the principles of quality and outcomes assessment.

The purpose of this study was to assess the Total Quality Management index of the higher education institutions in SurigaoCity in the areas of Leadership, Strategic Planning, Customer and Market Focus, Human Resource Management and Development, Performance Management, Curriculum Design and Development, Research Development, Community Relations and Partnerships, and Total Organizational Package. Results of the research served as basis in the development of the predictive model of Total Quality Management.

Both quantitative and qualitative approaches in research employing the descriptive-model-building design via regressional method were utilized in this study. The participants of this study were taken from the four private Higher Education Institutions in SurigaoCity. The data gathered from the respondents were analyzed using the following statistical tools: frequency count and percentage distribution, mean and standard deviation, analysis of variance, and multiple regressions.

Based on the findings of this study, the following conclusions are drawn: 1. women dominate in Higher Education Institutions and mostly are married who are in their 31-40 years of age. HEIs prefer to employ master’s degree holders on full-time basis; 2. The private Higher Education Institutions in Surigao City have fairly implemented the Total Quality Management systems, particularly in the areas of leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, human resources management and development, financial management, performance management, curriculum design and development, research development, community relations and partnerships, and total organizational package; 3. Length of service and highest educational attainment are variant factors of Total Quality Management index of Higher Education Institutions; 4. Leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, human resources management and development, financial management, performance management, curriculum design and development, research development, community relations and partnerships, and total organizational package operant predictors of HEIs’ Total Quality Management index; 5. The Total Quality Management index of the private HEIs in Surigao City can be measured using this predictive model,with 99.80 percent explained variance and 0.0366 standard error of estimate: TQM IndexHEIs (Ŷ) = 0.04 + 0.13 (X1) Customer and Market Focus + 0.13 (X2) Strategic Planning + 0.12 (X3) Human Resources Management and Development + 0.11 (X4) Community Relations and Partnerships + 0.11 (X5) Total Organizational Package + 0.10 (X6) Leadership + 0.10 (X7)Curriculum Design and Development + 0.10 (X8) Financial Management + 0.10 (X9) Performance Management + 0.09 (X10) Research Development.

In the light of the findings and conclusions of the study, it is recommended that Higher Education Institutions should: 1) always update their employees’ profile, particularly their length of service and highest educational attainment and consider these variables in any organizational planning; 2) ensure that their systems of feedbacking and feedback mechanisms are in place to increase leadership and customer satisfaction; 3) make certain that “monitoring progress to plan” is well structured in order to attain the real strategic cycle; 4) take a move to reviewing their employee evaluation and compensation systems to ensure that employees attain maximum job satisfaction; 4) ascertain that their human resource system develops the full potential of employees and drive the right behaviors in support of organizational performance and learning objectives; 5) establish a system of internal control in the management of their finances to facilitate the compliance of the organization to the standards of financial management ensuring the sustainability and stability of institutional operations; 6) should engage in active bench-marking activities for organizational processes to be able to reach performance management excellence through development of creative management designs, procedures and systems; 7) establish policy on periodic evaluation of curriculum and school activities in order to ensure that the school curriculum as a product provides venue for students’ development of functional skills and personal competencies through integration of theory and applications needed by the highly competitive industries; 8) set directions for innovative research and development programs with the purpose of sustaining the life of quality and excellence in the organization. The HEIs should urge teachers to engage in action research activities and make research part of their teaching schema facilitative of research-based instructions; 9) create aggressive designs for expansive alliances and linkages in order to maintain positive public image and gain financial assistance supportive of continuing community programs and projects as well as making community partners as the validating institutions of school’s quality assurance; 10) craft highly attractive designs with the integration of marketing-mix strategies for total organizational package to amplify the school’s market share in the industry; 11) take quality seriously at the institutional level and enforce themselves to always engage in continual improvement measures in order to develop and sustain the quest for quality and culture of excellence with the end view of augmenting their Total Quality Management index; 12) always consider length of service and highest educational attainment of the employees whenever they make plans and decisions in the light of the Total Quality Management perspectives; 13) make use of the predictive model of Total Quality Management developed in this study to measure their TQM index and use the result as a springboard in strategic planning, management and development; 14) A replication of this study should be made in order to expand the reliability and validity of results with the inclusion of other potential variables such as cross-sectional samples from basic education departments, staff and maintenance, and the like; and 15) For further studies related to this research, the following topics are hereby recommended:15.1 A Cohort Analysis on the Level of Total Quality Management among FAAP Accredited Higher Education Institutions; 15.2 A Comparative Analysis of the Total Quality Management Index among Private and Public Higher Education Institutions; 15.3 A Cohort Analysis on the Level of Total Quality Management among ISO Certified Higher Education Institutions; 15.4 A Relational Analysis on the Organizational Culture and TQM of Private Higher Education Institutions; 15.5 A Cross-Dimensional Analysis on the TQM Index of HEIs Administered by Business-Oriented CEOs and Education Graduate Top Management.