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Chileshe, N and Watson, P (2004) The measurement of quality management levels within UK construction SME's: development and validation of TQ-SMART. In: Khosrowshahi, F (Ed.), Proceedings 20th Annual ARCOM Conference, 1-3 September 2004, Edinburgh, UK. Association of Researchers in Construction Management, Vol. 1, 77–88.

  • Type: Conference Proceedings
  • Keywords: Total Quality Management (TQM); SME's; Questionnaires; Validation
  • ISBN/ISSN: 0 9534161 9 4
  • URL: http://www.arcom.ac.uk/-docs/proceedings/ar2004-0077-0088_Chileshe_and_Watson.pdf
  • Abstract:
    Manufacturing and service industries have developed and validated techniques for identifying critical success factors related to the measurement of deploying quality initiatives. However, little research has been undertaken to examine if these techniques can be applied to UK Construction related SMEs. This noted omission has been the motivation for this research project. The main aims of this paper are twofold; firstly, to identify the major constructs of Total Quality Management (TQM) and refine the scales for measuring the constructs, secondly to empirically validate these revised scales. Through a survey of 63 UK Construction related SMEs, this study empirically refines and validates 10 constructs for TQM in construction. The constructs refined in this study are compared with other major quality measurement instruments. The study reports on the operational framework of Total Quality-Self Monitoring and Assessment Rating Tool (TQ-SMART) which can be used to examine the levels of quality management initiatives within UK construction related SMEs. The findings indicate that TQ-SMART is both reliable and valid. This paper concludes by presenting the refined instrument which contributes to the performance improvement tools and techniques as advocated by the Egan (1998; 2002) reports and contributes to the TQM literature by validating the direct and indirect relations among the TQM practices on organisational performance.