Total Quality Management for Enhancing Organizational Performance: The Mediating Role of Green Manufacturing Practices

Owing to the rapidly deteriorating environment in developing countries caused by practices of manufacturing organizations and lack of adequate studies that can help manufacturing organizations to counter this issue, this paper aims to investigate the underlying relationship between total quality management (TQM) and the level of green manufacturing (GM) practices implementation in Palestinian food manufacturing companies (PFMC). The paper also investigates how GM practices mediate the relationship between TQM and Organizational Performance (OP) of PFMC. A quantitative research method using a survey instrument collected data from senior, quality, and human resources (HR) managers from 250 PFMC. The statistical data analysis indicated a significant positive correlation between TQM practices and overall OP (r = 0.605; p ≤ 0.01). This indicates that TQM practices significantly supports achieving overall OP objectives. Also, results found a significant positive correlation between the TQM practices and the implementation level of GM practices (r = 0.650; p ≤ 0.01), suggesting the significant role of TQM in enhancing organizational capabilities in implementing GM practices. Moreover, the results indicated that GM practices are equally important to TQM practices in enhancing overall OP; as GM practices were found to have a positive correlation with improving overall OP of PFMC (r = 0.827; p ≤ 0.01). Finally, TQM practices are found to have a significant indirect effect on OP mediated by GM practices (β = 0.55, p ≤ 0.05), whereas a significant total effect of TQM practices on OP were found (β = 0.64, p ≤ 0.05), reflecting that the GM practices' mediating effect partially accounts for roughly 86% of total effect of TQM practices on overall OP. This empirical study is considered as the first study investigating the impact of TQM practices on implementation of GM practices and their complementary impact on OP in Palestine, adding great value to literature via responding to calls to counter environmental issues in developing countries’ context.