CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1     Background of the Study

Embarking on the total quality management (TQM) phenomenon is a call for organizational excellence. The phenomenon which started spreading like wild fire across the globe in early 1986 has been spurred up by between companies of Japan, North America, Europe and Japan (Mahajan, 2007). That was the period the Japanese like the Americans and Europeans were producing and selling quality products at lower prices. Total quality management is a customer driven performance enhancing tool which can be applied to any type of organization. It balances the diverse elements of business. TQM requires an organization transformation terms such as leadership, strategic planning, human resources development and management, work processes, management, information system, external customers, employees and stakeholders.

Total quality management has been widely accepted as a disciplined approach that aims at achieving and increasing better production and services at progressive competitive prices, with minimum production and service cost. It involves doing things right on the first trial rather than making and correcting mistakes. By focusing on doing things right the first time, financial institution will avoid the high cost of what is associated with re-work. Many people perceive attention to quality as one of the most important competitive issues of today and beyond. Infact, quality may be one of the most important ways a manager adopts to set them apart from competitors (Nigel Slack et al 1998). Most business organizations with the manufacturing and service industries have in one time or the other experienced a drop in their level of job productivity while some are still suffering from it till today. At one time, managers believed that there was an inevitable trade between productivity and quality. They thought that the two are diametrically opposed that is, increasing one meant decreasing the other. Today, however, through a systematic application of TQM, effective managers consider productivity and quality as two sides of the same coin that increasing the other meant increasing the other.

Productivity simply means the ratio of output (that is the quality of goods and services produced to input (that is the quality of labour, capital, and energy (Ugwu, 2005). A manager of most organizations is faced with the problem of services development or modification of a quality service. In such a situation, the ratio of resource input would be higher than what the organization produces as output. Also, resources would be wasted as a result of re-work in trying to manufacture a quality product. This reveals that the level of job productivity would be adversely affected in financial institutions when customers are confronted with problems related to quality of services offered. In rendering quality services, there are six categories of cost which an institution must be able to prevent or control according to Onah (2008). The various categories of cost of quality are as follows:

1. The cost of activities which are designed to ensure conformance to agreed customers requirement cost of good quality.
2. The cost of activities which result from failure to conform to agreed customer requirements cost of non-conformance or cost of bad or poor quality.
3. The cost of lost opportunities and cost of lost sales.

These are the cost of activities, additional to a basic work process used in a business. According to Akpeiyi (1996), it is also believed that total quality management prevents problems from occurring by creating the attitude and control that make prevention possible and also builds a philosophy of continuous improvement, efficiency, productivity and long term success.

1.2     Statement of the Problem

For total quality management to be successful there is bound to be management commitment to it. In many cases, where total quality management is practiced, management often shows signs of greater commitment of determination to achieve the success. Most of the financial institutions that practice total quality management pursued this effort for longer period before achieving their goals. This may be due to pressures faced by management to set priorities that will help to maintain or improve the institutions’ performance. Total quality management applications  requires that management dedicate time, money, labour and other resources. Since this is the case, total quality  management often conflicts with higher priorities or initiatives.   Consequently, management may be out of necessity or convenience redirects its attention or resources to other priorities.  Another problem that is associated with total quality management practices which invariably have a dwindling effect on job productivity is lack of skill and knowledge. Not everyone in a financial institution has the pre-requisite attribute to make total quality management a reality. Hence the study seeks to empirically examine the impact of total quality management on job productivity in financial institutions.

1.3     Objectives of the Study

1. To ascertain the impact of total quality management (TQM) on the job productivity in financial institutions.
2. To examine how the application of TQM affects the prices of services in financial institutions.
3. To access the total quality management approaches adopted by Diamond Bank Plc.