Abstract:

Ensuring quality is a duty of education professionals. In the manufacturing and business sectors, Total Quality Management (TQM) has brought major improvements to customer services. This research aims to study the potential of implementing TQM to improve “Education Quality”. Only recently has TQM been introduced into other sectors such as education. Many TQM studies have shown that it is difficult for organisations to satisfy their customers’ expectations due to the complexity of exact identification for customers’ needs and wants. This makes it difficult to identify major quality elements and critical factors. This research makes use of previous TQM studies conducted in the service sector and extract the most influential and critical success factors. These factors can be useful and appropriate to transfer to the education sector and helps to improve its quality education services. The literature of Total Quality Management in both sectors shows differences amongst researchers in regard to the importance and classification of the TQM Critical Success Factors (CSFs). However, it has also been noticed that the researchers from both sectors have identified many similar elements. This paper provides a comparative analysis to the main Critical Success Factors of Total Quality Management between the service sector and the education sector. The researcher has selected the service sector to carry its comparative analysis due to the fact that education is considered as one of the main services provided by public as well as private organisations. In order to achieve the objectives of this paper, twenty eight articles on Total Quality Management and its CSF were reviewed. Fourteen of the papers are research studies in the service sector and the other fourteen in the education sector. The literature survey covered different regions, such as India, Iran, Jordan, and United Kingdom. The methodology used in this paper was based on secondary data. It has been found that the “Top Management Commitment” is the most influential factor in both sectors with an average more than 96%. The main findings revealed that factors such as training, education, involvement and empowerment, are all important and critical factors for successful TQM implementation in both sectors. On the other hand, the analysis has shown differences in the importance of some of the factors. e.g.; 50% of the service studies consider “Strategies and Policies” as a critical factor while only 14% of the education studies consider it critical. Similarly the “TQM Process Measurement” was highlighted by 36% as a critical factor in the service sector, while 64% emphasised this as a critical success factor in the education sector. The results also showed that the “Quality Culture” has ranked the fourth place in its importance to the service sector, while in the education sector its ranking was in the tenth place. In addition, the “Process Management” comes in the fourth place in the service sector, and on the seventh place in the education sector in regard to its essentiality. This research builds the foundation for the design of future case studies to improve TQM implementation in the education sector.

Keywords:

TQM, Service Sector, Educational Sector, Critical Success Factors.