Importance of organizational structure for TQM success and customer satisfaction

This paper reports a structural equation model to relate three critical success factors for total quality management (TQM) (i.e. managerial commitment, role of quality department, and quality policies) with customer satisfaction benefits through six hypotheses, which are statistically tested with information from 398 responses to a survey applied to Mexican manufacturing industry and using partial least squares technique integrated in WarpPLS v.6 software. The paper also reports a sensitivity analysis based on conditional probabilities for analyze low and high scenarios. Findings indicate that managerial commitment is the most important variable to ensure TQM, yet it depends on the role of the quality department for deploy quality policies and guarantee customer satisfaction. Similarly, sensibility analysis demonstrate that high levels of managerial commitment always guarantee a high performance in quality departments and good quality policies, thereby contributing to customer satisfaction. From this perspective, there are statistical evidence to declare that managers and operators are the main facilitators of TQM success.