Quality Management Systems and Organizational Performance: A Theoretical Review in Kenya’s Public Sector Organizations

Total Quality Management (TQM) has become an accepted technique to ensure performance and survival in the modern economies. In order to facilitate and impact the quality issues globally, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was first published in 1987 and was subsequently revised in 1994, 2000 and 2008. The ISO 9001 standards is a quality management standards that embraces principles of TQM and which merges organizational concerns with customer satisfaction, shareholder satisfaction, process efficiency, and employee wellbeing. The study focuses on customer satisfaction, employee engagement, productivity and management control. The paper reviewed the following theories: Expectancy-Disconfirmation Paradigm (EDP) as the most promising theoretical framework for the assessment of customer satisfaction; Herzberg motivation theory; Systems theory which consists of inputs, a transformation process, outputs, feedback and the environment and Henry Fayol’s administrative theory of management which focuses on the entire organization. The study adopted a conceptual research design approach using secondary data. Conceptual analysis was used to draw inferences from QMS studies’ findings in public and private sectors and in both goods and services industries keenly after a thorough examination. The purpose of the paper is to review the extant multidisciplinary based literature on quality management to propose a theoretical model relating quality management practices and firm performance. The paper focused on three objectives. Firstly, it sought to review the extant theoretical literature on the construct of quality management. Secondly, it identified relevant supporting theories to the construct of quality management. Thirdly the paper proposed a theoretical model for explaining the relationship between quality management and performance in diverse environmental contexts.