Total quality management (TQM) practices applied in education institutions: A systematic review of literature

Total quality management implementation approach has shown great prominence in management of education institutions through application of its practices to enhance quality of education and performance at the same time enabling education institutions to survive in the global competition amidst stringent budgets. The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic literature review to identify major total quality management practices used in education institution. The aim was to provide education institutions with reliable evidence for informing their selection of total quality management practices for quality performance improvement. A research strategy was performed on selected published papers between 1996 to 2016. This study used a systematic review of the literature contained in the three appropriate databases ERIC, Science Direct and emerald insight. Ten peer-reviewed research papers were identified through a screening process and were fully reviewed for the study. An analysis of the literature identified that top management commitment; continuous improvement and customer focus are the major total quality management practices used in education institutions. This study was limited by three data bases and search engines used and by the restricted number of keywords used in searching these sources. This systematic review of literature shows a gap in the existing research in that most Total quality management researchers put more consideration to higher education and secondary education and less to primary education with regards to total quality management practices. This study used a systematic literature review to identify TQM practices used in education institutions and identified that there is still gap in research on TQM practices in primary education. Copyright © 2017 The Education University of Hong Kong.