Enhancing Total Quality Management by Partnering in Construction

Abstract

Total quality management (TQM) has increasingly been introduced into the construction industry across many countries as an improvement strategy, but there are many barriers impeding its effectiveness in implementation. Many researchers pointed out that partnering can facilitate TQM application, yet the quintessential nature on the linkage between the two techniques is still not clear due to a lack of rigorous verifiable empirical evidence. With support of the data collected from a survey of the Chinese construction industry, together with a case study of the Three Gorges Dam Project, this study reveals the mechanism of how partnering, associated with incentives, can enhance the implementation of TQM into the construction industry. It is concluded that partnering can enhance TQM largely due to enhancing the links across the boundaries of organizations within a trust environment; and the impacts of incentives on TQM are through both aligning strong motivations to encourage participants using the established links efficiently and aligning the necessary financial resources for participants to directly assist the investment on improving TQM. Further studies should be conducted to build optimum links and alignments among all project participants to ensure intraorganizational TQM activities are congruent with the interorganizational interactions, which require future project organizations to change in order to fit this.

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