APPROACHES TO QUALITY MANAGEMENT AT EUROPEAN LEVEL

Abstract

In the current economic context, quality has become a source of competitive advantage and organizations must perceive quality as something natural and human in order to achieve excellence. The proper question for the context of the internationalisation of the economy is whether the culture of the regions, states or nations affects the development in the quality management field and the quality approach. The present study tries to give a theoretical approach of how culture influences the quality approach at the European level. The study deals only with the European quality approach, beacuse at European level one could meet a great variety of models and methodologies. In the U.S.A. and Japan one could identify a specific cultural approach regarding quality. At the European level, we cannot discuss in the same terms, because each country has a different cultural specifics in terms of quality. In order to determine the cultural specificity of the countries surveyed, the study has used the most popular analysis tool of cultural dimensions, namely the Dutch Professor Geert Hofstede\'s model. The model illustrates according to a survey, the organizational behavior of several countries and was able to identify a set of variables and fundamental dimensions, that differentiates one culture from another. An attempt was made to see if there are connections between the values of Hofestede \'s cultural dimensions and the quality characteristics in the analysed countries. The study, describes on the one hand,the quality evolution from quality control to Total Quality Management and on the other hand, focuses on the quality approach modalities at European level. The second part of the paper is structured into two parts, addressing on the one hand the quality in countries of Western Europe, such as United Kingdom, France and Germany,because these three countries are considered to be the exponents of quality development in Western Europe. In the same time, the paper seeks to explore the quality approach in Eastern Europe, with a brief analysis of cultural context and quality development in Romania.

Keywords

• quality, total quality management, quality culture, quality and cultural dimensions, European quality, Hofstede's model and quality