Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Total quality management -- Public opinion; Agricultural machinery industry -- Employees -- Attitudes;

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to identify and assess employee knowledge, attitude, and perception of quality costing in a manufacturing company. The company selected for this research was a small manufacturer of agricultural processing equipment with an undeveloped quality management program. A quality costs questionnaire was discovered from a review of the literature and was slightly modified to gather data from a sample of company employees. The following information was collected from employees: knowledge of common quality costing terminology, attitude towards quality and non-quality concepts, and perception of departments associated with quality costs and the scale of quality costs in the company. The researcher also examined the influence of several employee characteristics on the research findings.

A variety of statistical methods were conducted to analyze the data collected from the questionnaire. First, a hypothesis test was conducted using the z-distribution scale to test whether the majority of company employees had knowledge of seven quality costing terms. Second, a hypothesis test was conducted using Fisher's exact test to determine whether knowledge of terminology was equal between the company's business and manufacturing units. The third method for analysis was to produce descriptive statistics on the mean employee attitude rankings of five "quality versus non-quality" concepts. Next, multiple logistic regression analyses were used to evaluate the level of association between employee knowledge of terminology and the employment unit, experience, education and training. Similarly, linear regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the association between employee attitudes toward quality and the same covariates previously mentioned. Finally, employee perception of departments associated with quality costs and the scale of quality costs in the company were analyzed using chi-square analyses to determine the impact of the employee unit on the responses.

This research successfully identified employee knowledge, attitude, and perception of quality costing. Employee knowledge of terminology was found to be low. Attitude and perception of quality costing, on the other hand, were found to be favorable for the practice of quality costing. Recommendations were provided for the company's approach to quality costing and for future research in the field of quality costing.

Year of Submission

2011

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Industrial Technology

First Advisor

Ali E. Kashef

Comments

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Date Original

2011

Object Description

1 PDF file (112 pages)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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