A STUDY OF QUALITY-MANAGED HUMAN-SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS

Total Quality Management (TQM) is both a philosophical movement and a methodology for producing, organizing, and delivering goods and servic es through complex organizations and agencies. The TQM movement hit th e United States in the decade of the 1980s, and, unlike other recently popular approaches to management which wax and wane after a brief per iod, TQM appears to be gaining strength and momentum in the '90s as ev idenced by the increasing numbers of businesses and industries, both l arge and small, which have adopted its methodology and affirm their me mbership in the ''movement toward quality,'' also known as ''the race that never ends'' (Martin, 1993, p. 19). While the TQM movement is unq uestionably the single most dominant approach to administration and ma nagement in the private, for-profit sector in the United States, it al so is gaining recognition and respectability in the non-profit, human services field. There is a small but growing literature which suggests that TQM, also referred to as ''Continuous Quality Improvement'' (CQI ) or ''Performance Improvement'' (PI), is becoming accepted as the pre ferred approach to organizing and operating both public and private hu man service organizations (Brough, 1992; Lawler, Mohrman, & Ledford, 1 995; Moore & Kelly, 1996).