Decision Sciences zyxwvutsrqpo Volume 26 Number 5 Sept./Ocr. I995 Printed in the U.S.A. zyxwvutsrq Global Quality Management: A Research Focus* zyx Kee Young Kim and Dae Ryun Chang College of Business and Economics, Yonsei University, Seoul 120-749, Korea INTRODUCTION As global competition intensifies and becomes the new business reality, companies face difficult challenges in every aspect of corporate management. In particular, quality management must be examined anew when markets and manufacturing operations become global. “Global Quality Management” is an emerging area of practice but, despite frequent references to the term, it has not yet been systematically defined and researched. This issue of Decision Sciences takes Global Quality Man- agement as its research focus in order to contribute to our understanding of the concept, and to set an agenda for future research. Quality management has evolved from a basic engineering and statistical concept centered on statistical quality control to one that encompasses broad organizational concerns. The current generation of quality concepts is dominated by Total Quality Management (TQM) [l] [2] [3] [6]. Central concepts underlying TQM are now well established: customer value satisfaction, continuous improvement, and total organ- izational involvement are well understood to be critical factors in successful TQM implementations. While the TQM paradigm is intuitively appealing, and many firms are using it with considerable positive effect, many conceptual and practical questions remain unanswered when global markets and manufacturing are a fact of business life. For example, how can global corporations deal effectively with the diversity of customer requirements across country markets? Is it really possible to empower quality man- agement to all functions and levels across all country organizations within a global corporation? What are the implications of TQM in a global corporation in terms of cycle times and production costs? GLOBAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT Addressing such issues requires moving beyond TQM to develop a quality concept that reflects the nature of global corporations and their markets. We will call this concept “Global Quality Management” (GQM). We define GQM as: *The authors would like to acknowledge the invaluable support of the editor in the reviewing process of the research focus. and also appreciate the comments and suggestions on this paper made by the associate editors, in particular, Linda Sprague. zyxwvut 56 zyxwvu 1