ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the human resources implications of this interaction. It discusses the principles of total quality management and their relevance to environmental management. The chapter analyses the effects of Total quality management (TQM) on people management, while the third concluding section identifies some limitations of traditional TQM and argues for a transition to sustainable quality management-a transition in which human resources have a major part to play. TQM is aimed at enhancing organisational performance through increased customer satisfaction. TQM came into being as a response to the difficulties of reconciling engineering quality with the rapidly expanding, unskilled or semi-skilled workforces of wartime US and post-war Japan. One of the central features of TQM has been its extension of customer from external purchasers to any recipient of an product or service within or outside the company. TQM aspires to meet or exceed actual or latent customer expectations of a product or service, which are always changing.
