Assessing the Psychometric Properties of Deming's 14 Principles

Much has been written about Deming's philosophy and its role in creating a total quality environment in the workplace. The quality literature abounds with success stories of “Demingized” firms. To date, however, there has been no empirical research that tested the impact of Deming's philosophy on quality performance, or examined the interrelationships among Deming's practices. This may be attributed to the lack of existing reliable and valid measures of Deming's 14 principles. This article develops operational measures of Deming's 14 principles using data collected from 173 business unit managers. The psychometric properties of most of the proposed measures are found to be reliable and valid. Such measures can serve as valuable tools to industry practitioners and researchers. Managers can use these measures as a benchmarking tool to self-audit their total quality management (TQM) culture, based on Deming's framework, and to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Researchers can use these measures to better understand Deming's philosophy by building models and by testing hypotheses relating Deming's measures to firms' quality performance, productivity, market share, and employee morale.