The human touch of quality culture towards motivation to work in UTM

Abstract

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management philosophy which emphasizes the need to meet customer needs precisely, the importance of doing things right from the start, and the importance of recognizing that quality improvement will truly be achieved only when it is a goal of company employees and becomes part of the culture of the entire organization. Therefore, a study concerning academician’s awareness and perception of the soft side in quality culture was carried out in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). The main objectives of this study are to investigate the level of understanding towards values in quality culture among UTM’s academic staff; to investigate the implementation of human touch aspects in UTM’s quality culture; to identify the relation between the human touch aspects in quality culture and motivation to work, and lastly to identify the most dominance factors of human touch aspects for the implementation of quality culture in UTM. The study consists of 198 academic staff as research respondents. Finding revealed that majority UTM’s academic staff have good understanding towards the values given in quality culture. The findings of this study also showed that the level of perceptions among academicians towards the human touch of quality culture is at the level of average. This reveals that UTM’s academic staff still believes the existing of human touch aspects in order to implement the quality culture in UTM that including team working, sharing information and communication, empowerment, job design, creativity and innovation. The findings further elaborated that all the five aspects of human touch in quality culture had shown positive significant correlation towards motivation to work. The best predictor of human touch aspects in quality culture towards motivation to work was empowerment followed by sharing information and communication; creativity and innovation; job design and lastly team working.