Total Quality Management and Performance of Small and Medium Construction Companies in Nairobi City County

Abstract

This study was done to find out the Total Quality Management practices which have been adopted by small and medium enterprises that are carrying construction business within Nairobi City County. The study also looked at the effect contributed to by these practices to improve the organizational performance. A census survey was conducted in 108 construction firms by collecting primary data using structured questionnaire administered through drop and collect way of data collection. The data was then analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The relationship in the variables independent and dependent variables were found to be statistically significant by showing that the TQM practices do influence the organizational performance. A chi-square test was carried out and the result found out that there is a strong evidence of relationship between the TQM practices and the organization performance. The practice of customer focus is found to be the most important among other practices that have been studied in this research. It is also learnt that this research had some short comings such as the population sample size was quite small which doesn‟t give true representation of the population. Such a small sample size makes it difficult to generalize the results to the entire population. Therefore, some caution needs to be taken in interpreting and generalizing the results. Increasing the sample could yield more statistically significant results. Another possible limitation is that it only surveyed employees of companies mainly in two subsectors i.e. Engineering and Business. By conducting a larger study involving employees of companies in various sub-sectors, the investigator could avoid this limitation and thereby making it easy to generalize the results. In addition, organization performance is a very complex concept since contributions cannot be constrained only to the variables listed by the investigator. Therefore, in determining what exactly contributes to organization performance can be considered to be somewhat subjective. At this point, there is need for more research on other factors that contribute to organization performance that might not have been considered in this study to ascertain other contributors to organization performance since those covered in the model explain only a small proportion of this change according to the goodness of fit results. Key words, Organizational performance, Total quality management, Small and medium enterprises.