Background and purpose –Several studies and recent reports address emerging and expanding needs for Quality Management (QM) impacting the professional practices and activities and maybe also the conceptual underpinnings of QM. An integrative approach for QM, facilitating both operational and strategic leverage has been described as becoming increasingly more important. However, few empirical studies have focused on what QM professionals actually do with even fewer studies focusing on what it actually takes to do QM-work, i.e. the competencies of QM.

The purpose of this paper is thus to extend the conceptual understanding of QM by introducing an activity and practice-based terminology for describing competencies of QM work in contemporary Swedish organisations and to create a conceptual competence framework suited for successful QM.

Design/methodology/approach –This paper is based on a cross-case qualitative study design incorporating four Swedish large size organizations where designated QM professionals (n= 34) were targeted, selected and interviewed.

Findings –Four generic QM roles are posited: centralised & strategic, centralised & operational, decentralised & strategic and decentralised & operational roles. A QM competence framework incorporating four essential QM competence dimensions is presented: the human, the contextual, the methods & process and the development competence dimensions. Competencies are discussed in relation to the “production dilemma” of QM and the emerging need of more integrative and business excellence-oriented QM.