00490 887fd2c8d1fccf8dcbb366dccbd2576

497

Achieving Quality Results Through Blended Management

In Kaizen. Imai (1986) strongly endorses the idea of blended management. He insists that corporate strategy must be explained in a manner that can be understood, interpreted, and carried out by everyone in the company. It must provide a basis for communication between all individuals of a business organization. The strategy must relate to their needs and motivate their performance. Michael Haley, Vanderbilt University, supports these points in discussing the deployment of Total Quality Control (TQC) strategies in Japan:

To be implemented, the strategy must become concrete to everyone in the organization. Therefore, long-run strategies must be translated into short-run plans and objectives which are elear and actionable.

The principles of TQC provide the necessary structural framework to help both the employees and management communicate and decide how to improve the quality and productivity of work.

Above all, most importantly, TQC as corporate strategy must deal with people. Its net results are morę productive workers, morę efficient managers, improved Communications, and morę effective organization. Better and competitive products are the result of better people and better management, and not vice versa.

Quality strategy implementation cannot depend on a few highly proficient managers, consultants, or trainers, because fuli deployment is impossible if the expertise rests in just a handful of indispensable people. Customer oriented companies set themselves apart because their management roles are widely shared and their people are versatile, adaptable, and flexible.

Employee Involvement and Goal Selection

Managers should strive to provide the right amount of structure, while allowing for fuli employee participation. Giving employees the ability to choose their own goals allows them to satisfy personal interests while completing improvement tasks and it intemalizes the responsibility for task completion. When employees are involved in selecting their own goals, they experience a sense of self-efficacy for attaining them which is substantiated as they work at the task and make progress. Schunk (1989) documented that self-set goals promote achievement behaviors better than either extemally imposed