Internalizing a Culture of Business Excellence

Perspectives from Quality Professionals

Flevy Lasrado, Norhayati Zakaria

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351210706
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Underline by the importance of sustainable quality management practices to contemporary organizations, this edited book complies best practice cases of leaders who have initiated and facilitated quality practices in their organizations. The cases highlight how these best practices manifested in their work cultures, values, and beliefs. Not only do they address organizational efforts towards implementation of quality practices, but they also discuss the challenges the leaders faced to instill a sense of quality in practices across the hierarchical structures of their organizations.

The book highlights the profiles of quality leaders, their journey and their successes in leading quality in their organizations. A book would be an interesting read for those who are eager to integrate quality in their work culture.

A key message emerging from these expertise is that 'passion' is truly behind the quality success!

Chapter 1

Internalizing Organizational Excellence: Why and How

The questions “What inspires people to delve into quality-related professions?” and “What do quality professionals think about?” are often on the minds of many people. A simple answer to these questions is that for these professionals, quality is the priority in everything they do. For them, quality begins within themselves as consumers, when they think to ask questions about any and all services and products. This mind-set is clearly a prerequisite for a quality professional.

Truly, quality has a great deal of scope; as Henry Ford put it, “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” One implication of this is that quality has to be internalized at the personal level, and it has to be set within the DNA of ourselves and of the organization. So what is meant by the internalization of quality, and why is it important?

Introduction

Underlined by the importance of sustainable quality management practices to contemporary organizations, this edited book compiles best-practice examples of quality professionals who have initiated and facilitated quality practices in their organizations. The cases will highlight how these best practices have manifested in their work cultures, values, and beliefs. Not only do they address organizational efforts toward the implementation of quality practices, but they also discuss challenges leaders often face to instill a sense of quality practices across the hierarchical structures of their organizations. Each chapter facilitates interesting and thought-provoking discussions in order to teach key quality concepts and to apply relevant theoretical frameworks.

In today’s business world, because transnational companies face the dual challenges of managing global knowledge networks and multicultural project teams, as well as interacting and collaborating across boundaries using global communication technologies, it is crucial to have quality management programs in place that fit into these multicultural environments. Although quality management may be viewed as both a catalyst and driver for change, research has also clearly indicated that national culture is highly resistant to change due to diverse mind-sets, chaotic emotional challenges, and varying behavioral norms and patterns (Hofstede, 2001). In addition, although quality practices can easily be changed, the fundamental values that underlie those practices are very difficult to transform. Such a phenomenon would suggest a strong need for global firms to adapt their quality practices to the local national culture. As a consequence, the organizational cultures of globalized firms need to be aligned to the divergent values rooted in the national cultures of the local leaders and workforces. Accomplishing this cultural integration should not compromise the integrity of worldwide quality management policies; rather, program development efforts should be geared toward strategies that can be most effectively implemented in the local culture as well as the organizational culture. Thus, organizational leaders are increasingly in need of quality management approaches that will result in sustainable business practices.

Over the last few years, quality management and business excellence frameworks have been used extensively on the transnational scale to drive organizational performance. Indeed, managing quality is no longer a choice but a necessity to compete in highly globalized environments. The best practices of internalizing quality continue to evolve in this dynamic environment: organizations that continually adapt and learn from others thus manage to gain a competitive advantage. In the business world of today, with its diverse and multicultural workforce, it is important to learn from the best practices of companies in order to reap benefits in organizational performance, growth, and sustainability. This holds, in particular, for internalizing quality practices or organizational excellence.

Internalization: Why Is It Important?

Organizations have adopted several approaches to managing quality within their organization. Total quality management (TQM) is a well-known approach that many organizations use to monitor, control, and improve quality. Dozens of such programs have come into existence during TQM’s evolution. Indeed, quality is still evolving, as there is no universal definition for managing quality. Various perspectives are therefore used to define quality that will guide its implementation. Because the quality is still evolving, one looming challenge for organizations today is to truly internalize these quality initiatives. Various internal and external pressures may bind an organization to adopting a management approach to quality, but to what extent this approach will truly help an organization to emerge as high performing truly depends on the internalization of the quality.

Simply put, internalization implies the adoption of the underlying practices of quality in their daily use by managers and employees alike (Link and Naveh, 2006; Darnall and Sides, 2008; Nair and Prajogo, 2009). Managers often find it challenging to create this mind-set, even after their organization has successfully obtained certification for attaining a level of quality recognition. Hence, the level of internalization in daily practice depends on the intensity of the internal and external motivations that the organization’s managers and employees derive from such quality programs. Lasrado (2017), who studied the UAE context, listed several internal motivations and benefits that organizations generally perceive in a quality program. These include (1) the opportunity to benchmark, learn, share best practices, and improve processes; (2) the existence of a corporate image and market advantage; (3) the benefits experienced by others; (4) relations with communities and with the authorities; (5) customer pressure/demands; and (6) cost reductions.

While these factors help to reveal the benefits of adopting such programs, the encouragement for using these programs goes beyond simply recognizing the various factors in order to gain the crucial sustained performance of the organization. Through an empirical study of the various quality managers described in this book, several interesting insights are revealed about what drives their inspiration within the quality profession.

How Do We Internalize Organizational Excellence or Quality?

The next question that looms is how we internalize these practices. Studying this aspect of quality managers and leaders should help to present a number of strategies for internalizing a quality culture, including developing a passion for quality and internalizing quality at the personal level first. Lasrado (2018) notes that a survey of quality managers meant to determine the extent to which employees use documentation in their daily routines observed that although it takes significant time to prepare the documentation, these routines are embedded within employees’ daily work, and they motivate employees to become involved in quality initiatives. Organizations do often face difficulties in preparing the documentation, however, because of a lack of awareness about the standard itself, but involving employees in the process helps with this aspect in the long run. The organization-level documentation that is prepared as a result of quality initiatives is often utilized in the transformation of such initiatives into daily practices. Organizations mostly use these practices, which serve as a guide to quality culture. A number of factors can help in fostering the internalization of quality culture, including involving employees in the preparation of the documentation, providing adequate training in the usage of models, and integrating the requirements in the employees’ daily routines.

Improving Internalization with AMO Theory

The ability, motivation, and opportunity (AMO) framework was assembled from a few basic concepts of psychology:

■ Motivation: the impetus toward a behavior

■ Ability: the skills and capabilities required for the performance of a behavior

■ Opportunity: the contextual and situational constraints relevant to the performance of the behavior (Hughes, 2007)

The AMO framework was initially proposed by Bailey (1993), who suggested that ensuring employees’ discretionary effort requires three components: employees must have the necessary skills and the appropriate motivation, and employers had to offer them the opportunity to participate (Appelbaum et al., 2000). Based on this model and drawing on the concept of high-performance work systems (HPWSs), the model was later developed by Appelbaum et al. (2000). According to the model, people perform well when they have the capability and adequate motivation, and when their work environment provides opportunities to participate (Boselie, 2010; Boxall and Purcell, 2007).

The ability dimension is usually further defined by knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) (Fu et al., 2013). Thus, ability-enhancing practices aim to improve those three components. Examples of these practices include employee recruitment techniques or formal training (Kroon et al., 2013). The motivation dimension has to do with an employee’s desire to perform, which can be enhanced by extrinsic or intrinsic motivation. Examples of motivation-enhancing practices include incentives or career opportunities (Munteanu, 2014). Finally, the opportunity dimension considers not only individual characteristics but also the work environment, including practices such as quality circles or team-working exercises (Marin-Garcia and Tomas, 2016).

Taking all the this into account, as well as the importance of the AMO model and looking from various theoretical lenses of AMO theory, suggests that ability, motivation, and opportunity provide a basis for deep internalization. A question that should be asked related to the ability factor is, “What do employees experience being capable of?” Employees’ experience can be elicited to enhance their ability to understand and master standards, which have to be deeply rooted within their work systems. Similarly, the second question that needs to be asked is: “What motivates employees, and which tasks specifically do they find meaning in?” Third, “Which opportunities do employees’ experiences present?” Another question is, “What can managers do to improve ability, motivation, and opportunity to achieve internalization?”

Employees’ abilities can be enhanced by developing their quality skills and experience in using standards. Employees’ motivations to improve quality must be derived by directly involving them in the planning and implementing of quality initiatives; their roles or responsibilities should be embedded in the opportunities in order to improve their work systems. Managers should therefore focus on developing (1) ability-enhancing practices, such as building the awareness, training, and skills development of their employees in relation to quality standards, (2) motivation-enhancing practices, and (3) opportunity-enhancing practices in the form of employee involvement activities and the shaping of their job roles. Because organizational interests are best served by a system that attends to the employees’ AMO factors, building these interventions should help to internalize the quality practice. Overall, AMO theory also suggests that three independent work system components shape employee characteristics and contribute to the success of the organization. Essentially, we utilize employees’ abilities, desires, and opportunities to make a contribution to quality internalization.

The following chapters will explore specific quality and organizational excellence principles from the perspectives of several quality professionals.

References

Appelbaum , E., Bailey , T., Berg , P., and Kalleberg , A. L. (2000). Manufacturing Advantage: Why High Performance Work Systems Pay Off. London: ILR Press.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Authors
• 1 Internalizing Organizational Excellence: Why and How
• 2 Quality Culture at the Top: Insights from a Quality Leader
• 3 New CRM Acronym – “Customer Really Matters”
• 4 High Performance through People
• 5 Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement
• 6 Tools for Quality
• 7 Quality Awards and Certification: An Exceptional Journey
• 8 Towards Building a Culture of Business Excellence
• 9 What and Why of Benchmarking
• 10 Conclusion
• Index