Creating a culture of quality.

The article discusses research on quality-improvement actions and strategies that employers use to encourage employees to care about quality outcomes and to make quality a cultural value in the organization. The researchers found that leadership emphasis, message credibility, peer involvement, and employee ownership are attributes which predict a corporate culture focused on quality. The discussion topics include making quality a leadership priority, delivering communications that appeal to workers, holding peers responsible for quality, and empowering workers to make quality decisions and to challenge directives that do not maintain or improve quality. INSET: THE FOUR ESSENTIALS OF QUALITY.