In today’s competitive environment Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are facing many challenges and growing pressure from various stakeholders. To cope with this pressure, HEIs require a supportive managerial approach that fosters the understanding of stakeholders’ needs and expectations. 

Total Quality Management (TQM) is considered as one of the most comprehensive approaches to enhance performance and to meet customer needs.  While this approach is being successfully adopted in the manufacturing sector, the same cannot be achieved in many service organisations. HEIs operate in a unique environment with multiple stakeholders and the subjective nature of managing quality compared with the manufacturing industry and encounter more challenges due to their unique nature. Most of the existing studies focus on students’ view and there is a lack of research that focus on staff’ perspective. More attention should be given to staff due to their vital role in the education process as well as their closeness to the encountered problems in quality management. Some of these problems might result from the nature of HEIs environment, and some might originate from existing perceptions regarding TQM applicability in HEIs. 

This research aims to contribute toward the identification of TQM challenges in HEIs from the staff perspective in order to gain a better understanding of TQM challenges. The study designed to collect qualitative data by conducting semi-structured interviews with staff from HEIs. The findings are expected to be an important step towards the identification of major TQM challenges in HEIs and to create better awareness regarding the potential obstacles as well as to call future research to seek and propose a framework that facilitates successful TQM implementation.