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Although many adherents openly praise the importance of quality management practices (QMP) in organisations, others have identified significant costs and implementation obstacles. Some recent studies showed that QMP have failed due to the ignorance of quality cultures. How to improve the success rate of QMP in organisations has become a critical issue both in the academy and in practice. This paper discusses the common enablers of and cultural impacts on QMP. It explores the dimensions of national versus organisational culture, and identifies the main features of four quality culture models as advocated in the literature in relation to facilitating QMP in organisations. It was found that flat structures, decentralised functions, empowerment, flexibility, innovation, limited rules and regulations and teamwork favor the QMP implementation. For facilitating culture changes for QMP, values associated with low power distance, low uncertainty avoidance and collectivism would have to be nurtured. Further research is needed to incorporate the findings and develop a practical quality culture approach for real applications in industry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of company sizes and culture on quality management practices (QMP) in manufacturing organisations based in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T).

Empirical data were collected via a questionnaire survey, and 65 manufacturers in four different sizes were studied. The analysis of survey data was performed with the aid of SPSS.

The study signified five core dimensions of culture that would facilitate QMP implementation, and their relative importance would be dependent on varying company size. Organisation size appears to affect only the culture dimension of Low Power Distance.

This research has its limitations due to the fact that the samples were selected manufacturers with varying sizes in T&T. Direct measurements of the impacts of varying company size on culture and QMP were not included in the study.

The findings provided some insights in diagnosing the cultural dimensions and in developing quality culture in manufacturing organisations of T&T.