S. management community. In that decade, TQM has become something of a social movement. It has spread from its industrial origins to health care organizations, public bureaucracies, nonprofit organizations, and educational institutions. .

             There are particular assumptions set in place regarding TQM. The first assumption is about quality, which is assumed to be less costly to an organization than is poor workmanship. A fundamental premise of TQM is that the costs of poor quality (such as inspection, rework, lost customers, and so on) are far greater than the costs of developing processes that produce high-quality products and services. Although the organizational purposes espoused by the TQM authorities do not explicitly address traditional economic and accounting criteria of organizational effectiveness, their view is that organizations that produce quality goods will eventually do better even on traditional measures such as profitability than will organizations that attempt to keep costs low by compromising quality. The strong version of this assumption, implicit in Juran and Ishikawa but explicit and prominent in Deming's writing, is that producing quality products and services is not merely less costly but, in fact, is absolutely essential to long-term organizational survival. (Hackman & Wageman, 1995).

             The second assumption is about people. Employees naturally care about the quality of work they do and will take initiatives to improve it--so long as they are provided with the tools and training that are needed for quality improvement, and management pays attention to their ideas. As stated by Juran (1974: 4.54), "The human being exhibits an instinctive drive for precision, beauty, and perfection. When unrestrained by economics, this drive has created the art treasures of the ages." Deming and Ishikawa add that an organization must remove ail organizational systems that create fear--such as punishment for poor performance, appraisal systems that involve the comparative evaluation of employees, and merit pay.