BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE THROUGH TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW
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Purpose-This study systematically synthesizes how total quality management (TQM) and organizational innovation jointly create sustainable competitive advantage (SCA), and identifies the mechanisms and boundary conditions that explain inconsistent findings. Design/methodology/approach-A structured review was conducted following PRISMA 2020 reporting principles. Three reproducible English-language search strings were applied to OpenAlex for journal articles published from January 2000 to July 2026. The first 50 relevance-ranked records from each query produced 150 records and 131 unique records after DOI/title deduplication. Title–abstract screening and eligibility assessment produced a focused synthesis of 30 empirical and review studies directly addressing TQM, innovation, performance, competitiveness, or their mediating mechanisms. Findings-TQM contributes to SCA less as a stand-alone efficiency system than as an organizational architecture that develops learning, knowledge integration, employee involvement, customer sensing, process discipline, and innovation capability. Soft TQM generally provides the social conditions for exploratory and organizational innovation, whereas hard TQM provides data, standardization, and execution reliability. Their complementarity enables innovation to translate quality routines into differentiated value, adaptability, cost–quality consistency, and stakeholder legitimacy. Effects vary with culture, leadership, environmental dynamism, firm size, sector, digital maturity, and the balance between control and experimentation. Originality/value-The review advances a Quality–Innovation–Advantage (QIA) framework that separates capability formation, innovation conversion, and advantage renewal. It clarifies organizational innovation as both a mediator and a renewal mechanism, explaining why operational gains become sustainable only when quality capabilities are recombined as difficult-to-imitate routines and continuously adapted.
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