Quality Management (QM) has been recognized as a comprehensive management paradigm for enhancing organizational performance and competitiveness.
The importance of QM in management research was first addressed in a special issue of Academy of Management Review (Vol.19, Issue 3, 1994, Special Issue, “Total Quality”). While quality management and its underlying assumptions about organizations may be different from other management theory (Grant et al., 1994), research on quality management can be an important source for generating theories in the field of management. Quality management has practitioner origins which management theory should address (Dean and Bowen, 1994).
Traditionally, quality management has been considered as a functional/operational level strategy, where most of the research and theory building in QM is related to micro-level of organizations, like organizational structure (Spencer, 1994; Jenner et al., 1998), work performance (Waldman, 1994), organizational change (Reger et al., 1994; Jenner et al., 1998), control (Sitkin et al., 1994) human resource management (Cardy and Dobbins, 1996), organizational behavior (Shea and Howel, 1998) and leadership (Puffer and McCarthy, 1996). Despite some works in areas like organization systems (Spencer, 1994), contingency theory (Sitkin et al., 1994), organization culture (Manley, 1998), strategy (Reed et al., 1996; Reed et al., 2000), and ethics (Wicks, 2001; Ahmed and Machold, 2004) there is not much related work on macro-level analysis of organizations. Accordingly, there is a need to look at quality management from the strategic viewpoint, and to define a framework for its implementation through strategic and corporate level of analysis. While concepts such as ethics, cooperation, and trust are related to enterprise and corporate level strategies, these concepts are closely related to the practice of quality management (Wicks, 2001; Ahmed and Machold, 2004).
On the other hand, researchers and scholars in the field of quality management are concerned about the domain of quality management. Quality management has been traditionally addressed within the firm boundaries and they argue that due to the growing interest in inter-organizational alliances and networks, there is a need to understand quality management in new settings such as supply chain management and strategic networks (Sousa and Voss, 2002). Recent studies show that there are synergies between quality management and supply chain management performance (Flynn and Flynn, 2005). As Prahalad and Krishnan (1999) indicated, traditional definitions and approaches of quality do not fit within the new information age and a new definition for quality needs to be adapted. According to Robinson and Malhotra (2005) understanding quality management in a supply chain environment requires a transition form a product to a process oriented perspective towards quality.
While there is increasing interest towards strategic alliances and networks, scholars and practitioners are interested to know the critical success factors for such alliances (Gulati, 1998; Gulati et al., 2000; Arino et al., 2001; Inkpen, 2005; Sampson, 2005; Singh and Mitchell, 2005; White and Lui, 2005). Strategic alliances are considered as a useful mechanism for gaining competitive strategy, yet successful management of strategic alliances is a difficult challenge (Inkpen and Ross, 2001; Cohen and Mankin, 2002). Problems such as individual identity, cultural conflict and practices, and unstructured mission may affect the performance of alliances (Browning et al., 1995). Recently,
scholars have been called for research in the effect of firms’ characteristics on the performance of alliances (Zollo et al., 2002). It is expected that developing a holistic approach for improving the overall quality of strategic alliances can provide practical implications for resolving the above mentioned shortcomings of alliances and result in a network of organizations that leads to the success of alliances.
Despite extensive research and different theoretical frameworks for understanding strategic alliances and their success factors, little has been said on the effect of quality management practices on the success of strategic alliances. In that regards, this paper contributes both to the theory development in quality management and strategic alliances. First, it extends the concept of quality management beyond the scope of a firm and provides new directions and outlets for research in quality management. Second, it contributes to the existing body of knowledge in understanding successful strategic alliances.
