The effects of the critical factors of total quality management (TQM) in small and medium enterprises (SMES) on organizational performance: An application on food enterprises in İzmir province

Nowadays, everything regarding life, has been affected, has changed and developed by the concepts of globalization and knowledge based society. The wind of change, as a need of the information age has led up to the birth of the philosophy ?Total Quality Management? which is a human centered management approach.Intensive competition conditions have featured quality improvement as an essential that assures customer satisfaction for the enterprises. As a result of this competition Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) which have a great importance thanks to their flexibility and their ability to meet various customer needs, have begun to embrace Total Quality Management (TQM) activities.The SMEs that accentuate the critical factors of TQM and adopt those; would reach the quality on production and services, the customer who meets that quality on products and services would prefer those enterprises, sales would increase and the competition advantage would be gained against the competitors. In this context, there is a strict bound between to what degree the SMEs adopt the success factors of TQM and the organizational performance.In this study there are two parts which are theoretic and practical. At the first section of the theoretic part; SMEs and the entire perspectives of the concept TQM and the critical factors of TQM have been approached briefly, at the second section the concepts of performance and the organizational performance concepts have been approached. At the practical part, survey method has been implemented to the 100 restaurants which are in İzmir and appropriated the Total Quality approach. It has been analyzed with the questionnaire, if the Total Quality Management has affected the organizational performance or not; if it has, on which direction it has affected, the results have been evaluated on tables.Keywords: Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), Quality, Total Quality Management, Performance, Organizational Performance.