Changing from Production to Quality: Application of the Situational Leadership and Transtheoretical Change Models
Richard A. Grover and H. Fred Walker, University of Southern Maine.
This article addresses the problem of how to diffuse responsibility for quality throughout the organization. Central to this challenge is the need to shift the employee mindset and behavior away from exclusive focus on production or service delivery toward a mindset that integrates concern and responsibility for quality. The authors also suggest that two approaches in particular provide promising tools for managers attempting to diffuse a focus on quality throughout their organizations. These two models are the Transtheoretical Model of Change and the Situational Leadership Model.
Fundamentally, change occurs at the individual level. People need to replace one set of habits with another. The Transtheoretical Model of Change identifies empirically derived stages of change that people experience as they move through the process of unfreezing, freezing, and refreezing behaviors. The model then draws upon those psychological theories best suited to each stage of change to clarify the nature and demands of each stage. The Transtheoretical Model of Change thus offers a means for better understanding each step of the change process and identifying support strategies that can help a person move through any given change stage. The model suggests that people cycle through a series of predictable stages as they progress through any successful personal change effort. These stages are: 1) precontemplation; 2) contemplation; 3) preparation; 4) action; 5) maintenance; and 6) termination.
The Situational Leadership Model, first developed by Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard in the late 1960s, has become one of the most popular leadership approaches in industry today. The premise of the Situational Leadership Model is that, to be effective, leaders need to modify their actions to fit the ability and willingness (readiness level) of their followers who perform their work. The model posits four readiness levels and prescribes a style of leadership that most appropriately meets the needs of followers in each level.
The Situational Leadership Model nicely complements the Transtheoretical Model of Change in that it prescribes leader behaviors most appropriate to the needs of followers experiencing each of the various stages of the change process. In shifting mindsets from concern for production to concern for quality, managers must deal with two concerns. First, followers in the conventional quality department are not likely to have the skills and knowledge base needed to assume responsibility for quality. Second, followers must be motivated to take responsibility for quality. They must be convinced that there is reason to change their work focus. Both of these concerns can be addressed by combining the two change models. The Transtheoretical Model of Change is used to identify the needs of followers during each stage of change and the Situational Leadership Model prescribes the necessary actions that leaders must exercise to accommodate follower needs and help them move through the change process.
Making Hospitals More Transparent
Yoji Akao, Asahi University, and Edward R. Chaplin, Continental Rehabilitation Hospital.
In 1914 Ernest Codman called for public disclosure of hospital performance. That call has re-emerged. Hospital and medical group performance have been cloaked in secrecy rendering performance invisible to outsiders. Currently, customers have more access to cost, performance, and reliability data for automobiles, computers, and home appliances than they do for health care services. There is a lot of publicity today about making publicly traded organizations more transparent for the common good. But what about hospitals?
Collecting and comparing hospital performance is not a new idea; however, the process of identifying methodologies and measures for publicly disclosed performance has been slow and difficult. In Japan, Yoji Akao and his colleagues have recently proposed a way of categorizing quality in hospitals. They proposed putting quality assessments for complex service organizations such as hospitals into two major categories: outcome measures and process measures. Key measures for each category could be collectively audited and made public. Outcomes measures would be analogous to the quality of the final product in manufacturing and would include measures such as cure rates, survival rates, cost, and so on. Process measures are the vital signs of hospitals. They need to be sampled regularly, just like the vital signs of patients. They can be further subdivided into those that patients directly experience and those they do not.
This article presents an example that involves surgery on the carotid artery to prevent stroke, a carotid endarterectomy. The outcome measures could be reported as the number of people who have carotid surgery with good outcomes. Process measures might include customer satisfaction with physicians and hospital performance. Independent audits of the hospitals’ results would validate the data and enhance trustworthiness.
Publicly disclosed performance reports take away professional control, leaving hospitals and physicians subject to scrutiny. Yet, this article shows, it can improve quality and safety.
Measuring the Quality of University Computer Labs Using SERVQUAL: A Longitudinal Study
David W. Hughey and Sudhir K. Chawla, Angelo State University, and Zafar U. Khan, Eastern Michigan University.
The appropriateness of using SERVQUAL for measuring service quality for a wide range of services has been debated since the model was first presented by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry in 1985. While the protagonists of SERVQUAL have argued in favor of the original model and have modified it to make it more consistent, other researchers have questioned its usefulness and validity, particularly across a wide range of services.
Service quality measurement, or SERVQUAL, is used to measure the difference between perceived or provided service and the level of desired service. It can be used to produce a score for each service dimension along with an overall score. These scores can provide a benchmark that can be used for comparison. SERVQUAL originally used 11 categories to describe criteria that could be used to evaluate the quality of any service. Over the years, however, the number of categories has been reduced to five. These five dimensions are: 1) tangibles; 2) reliability; 3) responsiveness; 4) assurance; and 5) empathy.
This article presents an application of SERVQUAL to measure levels or dimensions of service provided by computer labs at a southwest state university. The intent of the study was to determine measurable categories of service and identify areas where improvements in service quality and customer satisfaction could be achieved in the university’s computer labs.
A total of 500 surveys were distributed in both 1999 and 2001. The 1999 study had an 83.4 percent response rate, and the 2001 survey had an 82.4 percent response rate. The surveys were analyzed using factor analysis. Related questions were grouped by factor. For the 1999 survey questions were grouped into three dimensions: staff, services, and professionalism.
The results of this study suggest that SERVQUAL may be used for measuring service quality for computer labs in an academic university environment. The study also demonstrates how results of a SERVQUAL survey may be used to improve service quality and increase or maintain customer satisfaction. The most significant finding in this study was the fact that the three 1999 SERVQUAL dimensions remained basically intact in 2001, with only minor problems. This suggests that the SERVQUAL model is reliable over time.
Understanding the Obstacles to TQM Success
Rose Sebastianelli and Nabil Tamimi, University of Scranton.
What makes TQM, or quality management, work? What is the cause of failed implementations? The study in this article involves survey-based research on the obstacles associated with managing a successful quality transformation. Although there have been many studies on the obstacles and barriers to TQM, this study extends previous research in this area in two ways. First, this survey focuses on the barriers that are associated with managing the quality transformation. This follows directly from a review of the relevant literature, which indicates that most obstacles to TQM can be linked directly to ineffective change management. Second, this study explores how these obstacles relate to potential undesirable outcomes of failed TQM.
The extent to which these barriers to TQM are perceived as real obstacles by quality managers is examined. Like previous research in this area, factor analysis is used to empirically derive obstacles from scale items that represent commonly cited barriers.
Relevant literature reveals that many of the obstacles that hinder TQM efforts, such as poor communication, lack of employee involvement, and inadequate resources, to name a few, are linked to how effectively the quality transformation is managed.
The research questions that are addressed in this study are:
- What obstacles associated with managing the quality transformation are perceived as real barriers to TQM success?
- How do these obstacles relate to specific outcomes that measure the perceived success or failure of TQM efforts?
Data were gathered for this study using a mail questionnaire, which was sent to a national sample of quality control and quality managers. The questionnaire had an overall response rate of 22 percent.
Factor analysis on managers’ ratings of frequently cited barriers to TQM revealed five underlying constructs:
- Inadequate human resource development and management
- Lack of planning for quality
- Lack of leadership for quality
- Inadequate resources for TQM
- Lack of customer focus
These five obstacles have been found to exert differential influence on various potential undesirable outcomes. Outcomes may be more easily observable than barriers in an organization. Observable outcomes can point to the unobservable TQM obstacles in need of managerial attention. And, by linking obstacles to outcomes, it is possible to determine which obstacles have the most effect on TQM success.
