Moving towards ethical quality management

Abstract

Organisations implement different quality programmes due to the wide range of benefits they bring to organisations (Sallis, 2002: 2; Oakland, 2014: 3). However, Talwar (2011) reports that the business landscape has changed over the years and quality programmes have not been adapted to cope with the challenges of ethics that organisations currently face. It is unfortunate that the number of media reports of organisations displaying unethical business practices do not seem to diminish (Jacobs, Agaba and Brady, 2018), (Hodal and Hammond, 2018; Cokayne, 2019). In response, it is still common practice for organisations to continue to manage quality and ethics separately to restore consumer confidence in their quality and ethics practices. This study attempts to develop a framework that can aid the practice of quality and ethics together, so as to ensure that potential ethics issues within quality are prevented from occurring. The multi-step method employed in the study explored the concept of ethical quality management by soliciting the views of top management, ethics practitioners and quality practitioners. In order to fulfil the objectives of the study, a qualitative approach (semi-structured interviews) was employed to get the views of top management regarding ethics issues within quality and how they can be prevented from occurring. This was followed by a three rounds Delphi Technique involving quality practitioners and ethics practitioners to aid building consensus on what the ethics issues are within quality, and how they can be prevented from happening. The third phase involved a quantitative research approach (survey) accessing a bigger audience of top management, ethics practitioners and quality practitioners to obtain their views on how quality can be managed ethically. Factor analysis was conducted and seven significant factors emerged which were incorporated into the final framework. The seven factors were used to develop a framework to facilitate a move towards ethical quality management. The final framework presented in this study should be implemented in addition to typical quality programmes to ensure that both quality and ethics requirements are addressed simultaneously. The beneficiaries of this study are mainly top management, quality practitioners and ethics practitioners. The framework will also be useful to industry as a whole since it promotes partnerships between all other professions interfacing with ethics and quality who are not necessarily in the quality or ethics fields.