Total quality management practices among women shea processors: Implication for job performance and household expenditure

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a strategic framework for the continuous improvement of an organisation's practices to achieve overall performance. In the food industry, TQM practices remain inevitable as far as quality remains a benchmark for sustained competition and customer satisfaction. Small businesses like shea processing require continuous improvement, value addition and quality assurance to guarantee access to lucrative and international markets. This could be realised through TQM implementation. However, there is a dearth of studies on the relevance of TQM practices on the performance of shea processors in the literature particularly in the Ghanaian context. Therefore, this study explored TQM implementation and its impact on small-scale women shea processors which is rare in the literature but of utmost importance. Cross-sectional data were obtained from 120 shea processors using a multi-stage sampling. The Seemingly Unrelated regression and Structural Equation Modelling were used to analyse the data. The study revealed that socioeconomic characteristics (age, education, experience, off-farm job, paid labour), sources of shea nut characteristics (self-collect, value of shea nut collected/purchased) and sales outlet characteristics (big processors) had heterogenous effect on the implementation of various TQM practices. Positively, all the TQM practices had covariance relationships. Further, the implementation of TQM practices such as training and development, innovation and customer focus had diverse positive effects on the number of customers and workers employed, while the number of customers per production had a positive effect on the household expenditure of processors.