Scale development of critical success factors for quality management practices: evidence from Indian manufacturing SMEs

In developing countries like India, the level of awareness about quality management practices (QMP) in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) has increased recently. This study attempts to develop and validate a QMP scale for manufacturing SMEs. Using Pareto analysis vital QMP factors were identified and questionnaire was administered to 750 SMEs with 68.5% response rate. In order to extract and validate the latent factors, exploratory factor analysis coupled with confirmatory factor analysis was used. Further, structural equation modelling (SEM) was deployed for determining interrelationships of extracted factors. This resulted in seven-QMP factors with R = (0.50-0.81) and R-squared values ranged between 0.23-0.66 representing the variation in 35 items. The study contributes to QMP literature, by bestowing empirical data on QMP factors which are more appropriate for manufacturing SMEs. Though the study was conducted in Indian SMEs context, the research outcomes may be applicable for general manufacturing firms with slight modifications.