Quality management and innovation: new insights on a structural contingency framework

With increasing market competition, organizations are striving for greater innovation in products and services. Quality management has the potential to invigorate an organization’s product, process and administrative innovation when strategically aligned with internal contingencies. This paper seeks to address the relationship between social and technical quality management with innovation. Moreover, this paper empirically assesses contingency factors including organization size, task and managerial ethics which play roles in moderating the relationship between quality management and innovation. Based on an empirical study we find social quality management practices, not technical quality management practices, are positively associated with innovation. We also find a reciprocal positive relationship between social quality management and technical quality management. In addition our research reveals the positive relationship between quality management and innovation is moderated by the effects of organizational size, task and managerial ethics.