Abstract

The new and challenging structure of the global business environment has been forcing organizations, including banks, to adopt innovative strategies to seek a better performance and sustain their competitive advantage. However, it has been widely emphasized in the literature that quality alone in the current transforming economies cannot attract the educated and technology-driven customer demands. Therefore, highly competitive leading organizations have to integrate various innovative strategies to attract and maintain their critical customers. Moreover, strategies should be looked at as means towards an end and they must be aligned with other organizational variables. Regarding the Yemeni banking system, it has been reported to have been suffering from many problems as a result of the lack of efficiency and customer and market focus. Furthermore, Yemeni banks lack the entrepreneurial capabilities to seize and take the advantage of the available business opportunities. This paper, however, tried to examine to what extent the relationship between total quality management (TQM), entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and performance is affected by the organizational culture by using the data collected from the Yemeni banking industry. The findings of this study supported the premises of the contingency and organizational change theories by confirming the significant role of organizational culture.

Key words: TQM practices, entrepreneurial orientation (EO), organizational culture (OC), the Yemeni banking system, organizational performance of a bank.