Organizational culture and quality improvement: Differences across continents

Abstract

Previous research shows that organizational factors influence quality improvement programs, and when there is a fit, it is leading to better business performances. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is an analysis of interdependence between organizational culture and quality improvement via testing the differences between dimensions and types of organizational cultures and applied procedures for quality improvement techniques on companies from 32 countries worldwide. Following detailed exploration of the available literature, data collection is conducted on 200 production enterprises in multinational supply chain. Upon this, further statistical examination is conducted by comparison of the companies in dependence of its locations - continents. Results show that there are significant differences on dimensions of organizational culture and applied quality improvement procedures depending of geographical location of companies. Accordingly, results of this paper prove that contextual approach promoted in ISO 9001:2015 has to be applied and organizations that operate in different countries and continents must decide how much to localize their organizational culture and related management practices to fit within the host country context.

Keywords

• organizational culture
• quality improvement
• differences
• multinational company
• countries and continents