The mediating role of organizational excellence between quality management practices and sustainable performance

The inconsistent relationships in the previous research studies related to quality management practices and sustainability have initiated the purpose of this study. Further investigation is prompted to understand better the effects of other intervening variables to explain the nature of the relationship. Therefore, this study investigated the mediating roles of organizational excellence on the relationship between quality management practices (QMP) and sustainability. The QMP considered in this study are human resources management (HRM), service design (SD), information and analysis (IA), benchmarking (BM) and management leadership (ML) with the respective relationship with sustainable performance while being mediated by organizational excellence. A questionnaire survey was administered to 303 companies of Malaysian food and beverage and the returned questionnaires were analyzed using PLS-SEM. The results revealed that organizational excellence is a significant mediator of the relationships between ML, SD, HRM and sustainability. The developed framework from this study can be employed by policy and decision-makers to forecast and provide insights into the economy. Managers in the industry should consider the importance of this model when implementing any practice in the future. For future research, it is recommended that a longitudinal study is carried out to evaluate the impact of TQM and organizational excellence on SP.