A Rough Set Based Total Quality Management Approach in Higher Education - Complex System Modelling and Control Through Intelligent Soft Computations - page 385

Cognitive Sciences, Knowledge Discovery, Decision Analysis and Expert Systems.
RST has an important advantage that it can handle inexact, uncertain and vague
datasets (Maji and Roy 2002 ). The chapter attempts to

fit TQM model into the
professional higher education system on the basis of selected ten attributes out of
which nine are conditional or independent attributes and one is decision or
dependent attribute. The empirical data is collected from the respondents in select
higher education institutions of India through a questionnaire.

2 Related Work

Total Quality Management has been successfully implemented in some Higher
Education Institutions, and it has improved the quality of higher education in those
institutions. In the last decade, TQM has emerged an important topic of research.
There is a growing interest of researcher in this topic, which can be tested by the
number of publications in this particular area.
The theoretical essence of the Deming approach to TQM concerns the creation
of an organizational system that fosters cooperation and learning for facilitating the
implementation of process management practices, which, in turn, leads to contin-
uous improvement of processes, products, and services as well as to employee
ful llment, both of which are critical to customer satisfaction, and ultimately, to

firm survival (Deming 1982 , 1994 ). It is possible to extract from the total quality
management philosophy, a set of traits, values, and behaviors that can lead to
positive outcomes for organizations (Anderson et al. 1994 ).
Quality in higher education means enabling students to achieve learning goals
and academic standards in effective educational environment (Venkatraman 2007 ).
Research proved that faculty has a major impact on students teaching (Hill et al.
2003 ) and is the main strength in an educational institution (Gary et al. 2005 ).
Quality in teaching and learning can only be enhanced if the faculty members are
satis

ed and content (Chen et al. 2006 ). According to Imai ( 2006 ), Kaizen theory is
all about employing small continuous steps to improve business organizations.
Consequently, it is a humanistic approach that involves everyone in the organiza-
tion from top managers to the employees. The concept is communicated from the
top and implemented by the employees.
Extant literature emphasized the importance of employee s job satisfaction and

performance in higher education (Ooi et al. 2007 ). Universities must provide
competitive levels of work environment conducive to faculty needs in order to
attain faculty commitment. This can only be achieved if universities emphasize
continuous improvement and identify mechanisms for quality improvement (Chen
et al. 2006 ). In literature, number of areas for faculty development can be found
with reference to TQM, such as teaching and research activities, administration and
management support, salary and promotion, professional development, overall
working environment, and decision making (Chen et al. 2006 ). An excess of
research can be found regarding student satisfaction in education (Sirvanci 2004 ).

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