In this article it is argued that quality development in higher education needs to go beyond the implementation of rules and processes for quality management purposes in order to improve the educational quality. Quality development rather has to focus on promoting a quality culture which is enabling individual actors to continuously improve their profession. While this understanding of quality as part of the organisational culture gains more importance there is still a lack of fundamental research and conceptual understanding of the phenomenon in itself. This article aims to lay the foundations for a comprehensive understanding of quality culture in organisations, focussing on higher education. For this purpose, the state-of-the-art in research about organisational culture is discussed and a model of quality culture is presented.