IMPACT OF TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT PRACTICES ON THE PERFORMANCE OF INSURANCE COMPANIES IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Total quality management (TQM) has been widely considered as the strategic, tactical and operational tool in the quality management research field. It is one of the most applied and well accepted approaches for business excellence besides, Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), Six Sigma, Just-in-Time (JIT) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) approaches. There is a great enthusiasm among manufacturing and service industries in adopting and implementing this strategy in order to maintain their sustainable competitive advantage. The study aimed to investigate and critically analyze the impact of total quality management on insurance firms’ performance in Nigeria. The study adopted a descriptive research survey that focuses on strategies of TQM and emerging issues that bugged its implementation in the Nigerian insurance market. The population of the study is the 58 insurance firms contained in the register of corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) and listed with National insurance commission as at December 2021. The study designed a structured 5-point likert-scale questionnaires for the managers since it was a firm level measurement. In the end 47 of instruments were successfully were filled and returned. Regression analysis was used in estimating the research model at 0.05 significance level. The result of the study indicated that Total quality management does not have a significant impact on insurance firms’ performance. In today’s fast-paced competitive environment, firms need to be increasingly innovative to establish a certain level of performance based upon novel technologies. The adoption of theoretical TQM would help insurance firms’ managers, brokers and practitioners in better understanding its practices while focusing on implementing TQM in their companies for enduring firm performance.