Causation or covariation: an empirical re-examination of the link between TQM and financial performance
研究了全面质量管理（TQM）与财务绩效之间的关系，使用波多里奇奖和州质量奖获奖企业样本，发现获奖企业在获奖前后财务表现均优于同行，但无法确定是TQM导致了绩效提升还是绩效好的企业更易采纳TQM。
Total Quality Management (TQM) is an integrated management system designed to focus an organization’s resources on increasing the quality of a firm’s products/services, satisfying customer needs and improving the efficiency of the processes that produce the firm’s products/services. Advocates of TQM have suggested that there should be a positive relationship between implementing TQM practices and financial performance measures. The empirical evidence supporting this assertion, however, is limited at best. Most of the research has been limited to surveys of managers’ perceptions of the effect of TQM on financial performance. A few empirical studies using financial performance measures have been done, and have shown that TQM firms have better financial performance than other firms. However, better performing companies may be more likely to adopt TQM, so that rather than being a path to improved financial success (causation), TQM merely “comes along for the ride” (covariation). This study examined the relationship between TQM and financial performance, using a sample of Baldrige Award winners and replicated with a second sample of state quality award winning companies, and three different sets of financial performance measures. Both Baldrige and state quality award winners generally had better financial performance than their peers after winning a quality award, and before.