Receiving a national quality award three times

A Strategic Approach to Mitigating Operational Failure Across Transitions

It is recognized that projects continue to deliver operational assets that are partially defective. This article proposes this because the causes of operational failures have not been extensively analyzed. This study explores how an infrastructure client made quality a strategic and project delivery necessity by undertaking research to analyze operational failure. A mixed-method approach consisting of three phases was used: (1) to understand the operational failure elements; (2) to explore the causes of operational failure; and (3) to develop a new strategic framework to address failure mitigation. The study showed the need for transferring, applying, and recognizing capabilities across strategic business, project delivery, and operational use transitions.

Organizational culture and performance: a macro-level longitudinal study

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to take a series of snapshots of perceived organizational culture over time, analyze the longitudinal pattern of its change, examine the relationship between organizational culture and organizational performance and verify if the relationship remains consistent, regardless of the flow of time.

Design/methodology/approach

Competing values framework and balanced scorecard are employed to look at organizational culture and its link with organizational performance; the panel data with more than 400 Korean firms from three biennial waves (2011, 2013 and 2015) are analyzed for a macro-level longitudinal examination.

Findings

Findings include that clan and market cultures were more prevalent than adhocracy and hierarchy cultures, and clan culture significantly decreased over time (H1); adhocracy, clan and market cultures had a consistently positive relationship with all the performance variables over the years and demonstrated a stronger impact in that order (H2).

Research limitations/implications

The results call for continued research on organizational culture in a longitudinal and cross-sectional nature, and a more comprehensive culture framework for today’s organizations.

Practical implications

Suggestions include that leaders should engage in bilateral communications and network building for successful organization development and change, and take a comprehensive, long-range approach in conducting cultural assessments.

Originality/value

The current study addresses a lack of empirical support and a single organization, point-of-time perspective in organizational culture research by examining organizational culture and performance with a macro-level longitudinal approach.

The excellence quest: a study of business excellence award-winning organizations in UAE

Purpose

Organizations worldwide use national quality awards for improving organizational excellence. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched its business excellence awards for the private and public sectors almost two decades ago. Within the past dozen years, UAE companies have made considerable progress in introducing and developing their quality management systems. The purpose of this paper is to report the advance of UAE organizations in business excellence initiatives and highlight the contributions of the award-winning organizations in adopting business excellence approach.

Design/methodology/approach

This research used a qualitative approach to study award-winning organizations. Initially, secondary data were gathered from the Office of Department of Economic Development which is responsible for the administration of the Dubai Quality Award (DQA). Data were entered and categorized according to the description of organizational practice, company name, industrial sector and DQA criteria. The data were then analyzed using NVivo 10.0 software.

Findings

The DQA fosters and guides the excellence journey of aspiring organizations not only to win a quality award, but to strengthen their quality initiative through an informative assessment report. The DQA model was perceived by all organizations as a useful approach to quality improvement. Winning organizations have exhibited unique programs developed to embrace the DQA factors. Recommendations for aspiring organizations are discussed.

Originality/value

This paper should help managers to plan their journey toward business excellence and to create greater awareness of excellence frameworks and their usefulness when embarking on the path of excellence. This paper adds to the knowledge of the UAE’s excellence awards scheme and to the knowledge of business excellence best practices deep rooted in multi-cultural organizational environments. It highlights future research avenues for excellence frameworks.