While many firms realize the benefits of quality improvement, many others founder or fail in the attempt to implement quality improvement programmes. This paper presents and discusses the influence of self-efficacy, a construct that has consistently provided valuable insights in organizational research, on quality training success. We propose that applying self-efficacy to the quality improvement environment is an appropriate and promising area of research. We offer a series of propositions linking the types of self-efficacy information offered to the effectiveness of quality training programmes in organizations. We suggest that self-efficacy provides insights into why some quality training programmes work while others do not—tent may be same, but what matters is whether or not it is delivered via the most valuable sources of self-efficacy information. We conclude with a discussion of its applicability to the quality environment using an analogy and provide an agenda for future research.