An Empirical Study of Employee Involvement, Total Quality Management and Organisational Performance in Manufacturing Enterprises

Recent studies advocate that there is a positive relationship between levels of employee involement (EI) and the productivity and long‐term financial performance of organisations. The adoption of EI practices has been recognised as a means of drive organisations towards performance improvement. This paper discusses the constituent elements of EI and the integration of EI and total quality management (TQM) practices with respect to improving the organisational performance in manufacturing enterprises with respect to improving the organisational performance in manufacturing enterprises. Incorporated they key findings of an empirical study with a sample of 166 organisations in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the paper addresses two problem statements: Do the information sharing, knowledge training, pay/reward systems and power/authority sharing affect the adoption of EI practices? Does the integration of EI/TQM practices contribute to better organisational performance as perceived by manufacturing enterprises? The need to interweave both EI and TQM efforts into organisational performance improvmement is also discussed.