• Civil service reform

Civil service reform

This paper analyses the suitability of Total Quality Management (TQM) for public organizations and identifies the preconditions that have to be met in order to gain success in implementing TQM. The paper argues that although the implementation of TQM in public sector is usually associated with the ideas of New Public Management (NPM), it shares several similar tenets with traditional public administration.
The author makes the following main points about the relationship between TQM and public administration:

• TQM as people management and TQM as new paradigm resemble NPM because of their emphasis on customer-orientation (including internal customers), decentralisation and empowerment, drive for better results and measurement ethos of entrepreneurship
• TQM and bureaucracy share emphasis on processes, reliance on written rules, clear definitions of rights and obligations, expert training etc.
• the particular way of implementing TQM to a public organisation is dependent on the degree of publicness that characterises the organisation
• organisations with a high degree of publicness find it harder to accommodate “soft” approaches to management (e.g. motivating and empowering people, entrepreneurial attitude towards solving problems) and organisations with a low degree of publicness do not tend to rely on elaborate rules.
• in addition, decision-makers in public organisations have to be aware of the relationships between the paradigms of public administration that influence their organisations and management ideas or instruments in choosing the appropriate management approach for their agency.

In sum, the author says, TQM will not lose its relevance in future public administration. The growing need for better quality public governance necessitates new approaches to operationalise TQM. One has to “loan” ideas and practices from different rationalisations of TQM to build a contingency sensitive model of TQM in a particular public agency, taking into account its degree of publicness. The kind of TQM system that comprises elements associated with bureaucracy, NPM and governance might be helpful in reconciling different challenges posed for public organisations

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