The intensity of business rivalry and the turbulent changes facing today's organizations, coupled with the emergence of the m

The last century saw the emergence of a new approach by the business world which is to adapt to the continuously changing needs of this ever competitive environment – the focus on the human resource or simply the employees. It is obvious that the quality of the employee determines the very future direction of any institution, be it a profit-making organization or a non-commercial organization. Hence, it is vital for organizations to address the needs of the employees in order to sustain their competitive edge and to outperform their competitors. This paper is an overview of ways of increasing an employee’s motivation to strive for quality improvement culled from existing literature. 1.0 Introduction The intensity of business rivalry and the turbulent changes facing today's organizations, coupled with the emergence of the more matured, better informed and more discriminating customers, have pushed the boundaries of organizations to compete at the highest level – with the primary focus on the quality of their produced goods and services. Hence, the need for a quality management program is no longer an option, but has become an imperative – a crucial need for organizations in maintaining the competitive edge. Consequently, many have adopted the Total Quality Management (TQM) programs in facing this heightening situation. Moreover, virtually every examination of the quality environment with which we are familiar emphasizes the importance of employees, from the top management (Choi and Behling, 1997; Solomon, 1996) to the non-management workforce (Bowen and Lawler, 1992; Dean and Evans, 1994) to successful implementation of any quality program. In other words, the principles of TQM presume full commitment from all levels of the management in both words and actions to a process, in which quality is an integral part of the production (Miller & Cangemi, 1998). Thus, the vitality of employee involvement arises as TQM is not a system but it is rather a “state of mind, both collectively and individually”. When implemented effectively, TQM empowers all people in an organization to do their best to fully satisfy all customers’ needs (Anjard, 1988). The assumption made is that employees need to be “turned on” to the challenges inherent in the quality environment, that fear must be driven out, and that employees are expected to participate and work toward the organizational benefit (Shearer, 1996). However, a great deal of emerging literature has suggested that TQM represents anything but a panacea, and that many efforts to introduce quality programs have encountered problems. Among many others, one of the main reasons for such failures was that it overemphasized the “hard” side of the quality and neglected the “soft” side of the people which depends on the broad-based employee involvement and commitment (Simon, 1996).