QUALITY CULTURE AND ITS ROLE IN ACHIEVING DESIRABLE UNIVERSITIES PERFORMANCE

ABSTRACT- Quality culture, which is a sub-set of organizational culture, helps continuous quality enhancement. As such, quality culture at the university level, is defined as a collection of beliefs, attitudes, values and norms that academic members, managers and administrators share; and common activities that they participate in to achieve university’s quality assurance. Quality culture is composed of two aspects: (a) psychological/ cultural, (b) structural / official processes for quality improvement. Psychological aspect of quality culture may be considered at the individual and collective level. Furthermore, official processes for quality improvement includes: definition of quality, modeling, constructing /selecting measuring instruments, data collection and analysis, quality judgment, preparing reports and finally acting upon the changes towards improving and quality assurance. Based on the above, this article first reviews the sort of beliefs, values, attitudes, and expectations that academic members, managers and administrators of a university should share and common activities that they are supposed to participate in, at the university level, in order to achieve continuous quality improvement. In the second part of the article, the need for apprehension of quality by academic members and their commitments towards quality education and research at the departmental level, through internal quality assessment and external quality assurance are discussed. Furthermore, the structural /managerial aspect of quality culture is analyzed. Finally, the processes of propagating quality culture at the university level, with emphasis on engineering departments, are considered.