Relationships between quality management, innovation and performance : A literature systematic review

The aim of this paper is to carry out a systematic literature review about the relationships between quality management, innovation, and performance. For that end, a search was carried out in the Web of Science and Scopus databases, and 172 articles were selected. Results show that there is a positive relationship between quality management, product and process innovation (incremental and radical), and operational and financial performance, and direct and indirect relationships. Based on these results, a set of direct and indirect relationships between these variables is proposed. The study supplements the few previous investigations on these joint relationships.