Quality Management Initiatives in Europe: an Empirical Analysis according to Their Structural Elements Gutiérrez Gutiérrez, Leopoldo Tamayo Torres, Ignacio Barrales Molina, Vanesa Quality Management Implementation QM practices EFQM Six Sigma ISO Quality Control "This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Total Quality Management and Business Excellence on 10 June 2010, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14783363.2010.483064." In recent years, managers have opted for implementing Quality Management in their firms. The market offers different alternatives for QM implementation, such as EFQM model, ISO standards, Malcolm Baldrige or the recent Six Sigma methodology. Implementation difficulty of each initiative varies from case to case. This article designs a criterion for choosing among four alternatives (Quality Control, EFQM, Six Sigma and ISO 9000), according to the degree of development required for the elements that structure the alternatives. To do so, using an ANOVA analysis and mean comparison T-tests, it analyses 234 organizations in Europe that have implemented the four alternatives mentioned and observes the degree of development of nine of the elements that compose them. From the research, one can conclude that Quality Control is the simplest initiative, followed by ISO 9000 and, finally, the EFQM model and Six Sigma methodology. 2015-04-29T06:29:49Z 2015-04-29T06:29:49Z 2010 journal article Gutiérrez-Gutiérrez, L.; Tamayo-Torres, I.; Barrales-Molina, V. Quality Management Initiatives in Europe: an Empirical Analysis according to Their Structural Elements. Total Quality Management and Business Excellence. 21(6): 577-601 (2010). [http://hdl.handle.net/10481/35841] 1478-3363 1478-3371 http://hdl.handle.net/10481/35841 10.1080/14783363.2010.483064 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ open access Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License Taylor and Francis