The criticality of quality management in building corporate resilience

Abstract

The link between the concept of quality and corporate demise has been long established to hold true. In a survey of 120 organizations wound up between 2000 and 2007 in five continents, Marwa and Zairi (2008a) established that there was some causation relationship between quality management and corporate demise. Ignorance of quality, if unchecked, inevitably triggers corporate collapse. Stamping corporate demise thus calls for managers to give best practice quality management principles a chance to thrive than they've been willing to do before. This is particularly crucial, with the economic recession, where corporations are worried about their level of economic exposure and what they should do to survive these troubled times? Bryan and Farrell (2008) argue that companies that acted prudently in the autumn of 2008 to cushion themselves against the adverse effects of recession, may not have probably produced short-term earnings, but may well have underwritten their survival. Arguably, attending to corporate quality flaws must therefore be at the heart of any effective post-recession strategy in order to build corporate resilience. The article explores the linkage between recession recovery strategies and their association with the concept of quality management. Literature on recession/post-recession recovery strategies is reviewed and constructs of quality management inherent extracted. These constructs are then compared with those obtained from the literature review on quality management to establish commonality, which, if present, should point to the criticality of quality management in any effective post-recession recovery strategy.