Evaluation of Total Quality Management in Turkish Pharmaceutical Companies: A Case Study

Abstract

Corporate sustainability is one of the most challenging issues in superior organizations, and is always one of the main concerns of top managers. The importance of quality management in organizations—especially as total quality management—is considered to be one of the most important indicators of sustainability. We cannot achieve sustainability and its important sub-parameters—including economic and social sustainability—by merely employing the value of knowledge creation and knowledge sharing, without also focusing on customers, leadership, and process management. We designed appropriate questionnaires to test this premise, and then distributed and collected them from various reputable pharmaceutical companies in Turkey. We recorded the opinions of managers, supervisors, and deputies of different departments at various organizational levels. To analyze the data, SPSS software—one of the well-known applications in this field—was used. The new regular economy introduces new requirements for newly built public universities or pharmaceutical companies; therefore, their transformation and development are imminent. For example, colleges should comply with the new requirements of economic and social transformation for higher education, innovate their talent training models, and cultivate higher ideological standards and morality while instilling strong practical ability in their graduates to serve society. The results of this study not only illustrate the positive effects of total quality management on firms’ sustainability, but also validate knowledge management and its sub-variables, including knowledge creation and sharing. In addition, they confirm the mediating role of sub-variables, including knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in companies, influencing the effects of total quality management on the sustainability of companies.