Abstract
Government infrastructure construction projects were plagued with delays, cost overruns, and quality issues. Traditionally, quality management has been applied to projects. Quality failures were linked to failure to meet project objectives in this study which aimed to explore the quality management practices that contractors adopt within the infrastructure development and, more specifically, in projects involving State-owned enterprises. The mix-method, particularly the convergent approach, was used, employing a survey questionnaire for the contractors, analysing clients' documents, and qualitatively interviewing the clients' project selected personnel. The Central Supplier Database under National Treasury was used to select contractors that work specifically for the SOE under study. Descriptive and Inferential statistics were used to get to the results. Thirty- nine (39) respondents to the questionnaire survey and ten (10) representatives of the client were interviewed, over and above the four (4) documents analysed. In descriptive statistics, the central tendency was measured and, inferential statistics, non-parametric test spearman rho was used to test for correlation and ranking, and the statistically significant difference between groups, Kruskal-Wallis test and Mann- Whitney U test was used to test for statistical significance of the ordinal data. Results from the quantitative phase revealed that both the contractors and the client understood quality management practices. This was evident in how the contractors ranked the importance of each quality management practice. Also, the extent of implementation revealed that these practices are implemented to a large extent. The relationship between the main constructs, quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, organisational culture, and project performance, was found to be having a positive strength. Keywords: Quality management practices, contractors, construction lifecycle and organisational culture