Total Quality Management and the Choice of Information and Reward Systems

This paper examines the association between the use of advanced manufacturing practices and the choice of information and reward systems, and explores the impact of these choices on organizational performance. Although advanced manufacturing practices such as total quality management (TQMI) have been widely adopted over the past decade, surveys indicate that most of these initiatives have not yielded significant economic benefits (e.g., Mathews and Katel [1992] and The Economist [1992]). Many accounting researchers charge that the poor performance of many new manufacturing initiatives is due in part to continued reliance on traditional management accounting systems that do not provide appropriate problem-solving data, performance measures, and reward systems.1 We conduct an exploratory analysis of these claims using a