How Learning Atmosphere is Connected to Quality Practices: – A Case Study of a Korean Service Firm

The purposes of this study is to identify the degree to which employees exhibit the concepts of learning organization(LO) and total quality management(TQM) practices in a Korean insurance company and to verify the relationship between the sub-concepts of LO such as Shared Vision(SV), Mental Models(MM), Team Learning(TL), Personal Master(PM), and System Thinking(ST) and the sub-practices of TQM such as Teamwork(TW), Continuous Improvement(CI), Process Management(PMGMT), and Customer Focus(CF) in their workplace. This research finds TL, ST, and PM have significant relationship with CI; TL and SV with TW; and ST with CF. Based on the results, the research find ST is most strongly related to CF and TL have the strongest relationship with both TW and CI. This research supports that “TQM and LO are mutually dependent” advocated by previous researches but LO concept did not cover the whole TQM concept in this firm, although some specific LO disciplines had consistently high relationship with some of TQM principles.