European Foundation for Quality Management (efqm) Business Excellence Model: a Literature Review and Future Research Agenda

The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) business excellence model is widely recognized as a representative theory to improve traditional Total Quality Management (TQM) by expanding the narrow quality-oriented concept into a holistic management concept. The EFQM model, an integrative business system, covers all management activities composed of input, process, and output (Black et al., 1997; Seghezzi, 2001). From this theoretical perspective, the evolution of the EFQM model inquiry should be based on various research topics and methodologies in order to cover a wide span of management areas. Despite the key issue related to the employment of research topics and instruments, examining current papers indicates that studies of EFQM model have been not addressed these concerns. Unfortunately, there is no review paper to identify the current status of the field and propose future research areas. We argue that current studies on the EFQM model have missed the model’s fundamental nature: emphasizing comprehensive exploration and implementation. A number of papers, for instance, have been focused on limited research topics, namely performance measurement, and the EFQM model’s paradigm. Moreover, a dominant paradigm for the research methodologies has been the use of case studies. Consistent with the view of Kilduff (2006), it is, however, our argument that theory should be developed by constantly challenging the existing knowledge with various research topics and methodologies.