Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs – June, 2018

Welcome to June, 2018 edition of Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs.

A few days back I was reading the article Should Organizational Cuture Form Part of Your Quality Management System?. As I was reading through the article, I thought up of choosing Organizational Culture as our base topic for discussion this month.

The information that comes in a Google Search is simply overwhelming. I have selected a few articles here.

MSS 1000 defines organizational culture as group shared values and perceptions of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours.

NOTE 1: Culture is a socially driven phenomenon where people conform to norms to gain the acceptance of the group and resulting benefits.

NOTE 2: Culture cannot be directly imposed by the leaders of an organization – it establishes over time through the influence of a combination of leadership communication, example and compliance with the implemented management system. Behaviours that are encouraged or enforced over time influence and create the culture.

NOTE 3: A positive culture values justice, responsible questioning and equitably satisfying stakeholder needs and expectations.

What is organizational culture – Torben Rick broadly identifies it as

• Culture is how organizations do things
• The values and behaviors that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization
• Organizational culture defines a jointly shared description of an organization from within
• Organizational culture is the sum of values and rituals which serve as “glue” to integrate the members of the organization
• Organizational culture is a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs, which governs how people behave in organizations
• Organizational culture is civilization in the workplace
• Organizational culture refers to the philosophies, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and practices that define an organization
• Culture is the organization’s immune system
• It over simplifies the situation in large organizations to assume there is only one culture … and it’s risky for new leaders to ignore the sub-cultures

At its worst, corporate culture can be a drag on productivity and performance. At its best, it is an emotional energizer….Corporate culture is like an iceberg, with most of its weight and bulk below the surface. Don’t leave the organizational iceberg unattended!…

And let’s not forget that the culture of any organization is shaped by leadership.

“The best definition of the word culture (workplaces included) that I’ve heard is that it’s how people behave when nobody is watching.” — Gwyn Morgan

Michael D. Watkins, in his article ‘What Is Organizational Culture? And Why Should We Care?’, narrates perspectives that provide the kind of holistic, nuanced view of organizational culture that is needed by leaders in order to truly understand their organizations — and to have any hope of changing them for the better.

10 Principles of Organizational Culture by Jon Katzenbach, Carolin Oelschlegel, and James Thomas :

Three dimensions of corporate culture affect its alignment: symbolic reminders (artifacts that are entirely visible), keystone behaviors (recurring acts that trigger other behaviors and that are both visible and invisible), and mind-sets (attitudes and beliefs that are widely shared but exclusively invisible). Of these, behaviors are the most powerful determinant of real change. What people actually do matters more, than what they say or believe. And so to obtain more positive influences from your cultural situation, you should start working on changing the most critical behaviors — the mind-sets will follow. Over time, altered behavior patterns and habits can produce better results.

“Culture eats process for breakfast.” If you don’t work as hard on creating new culture, a culture supported by systems, structure, skills and style—your culture will eat your process. — Unknown

Here are a few representative articles on impact of organizational culture on the effectiveness of the management systems:

• How corporate culture affects performance management?
• Organizational culture and safety performance by Zack Mansdorf, Ph.D.
• The influence of organizational culture on Management Information System – Arlis Dewi Kuraesin
• Culture and QMS implementation
• Organizational Culture for Knowledge Management Systems: A Study of Corporate Users – Andrew Ciganke, En Mao, Mark Srite
• The Relationship Between Organizational Culture and ERP by Joey Benadretti

We will now turn to our regular sections:

For the present episode we have picked up Bruce Rosenstein’s article ‘How To Be An Employee The Peter Drucker Way’ @ Competitive Strategy column of Management Matters Network….“There are many skills you might learn to be an employee, many abilities that are required. But fundamentally the one quality demanded of you will not be skill, knowledge, or talent, but character.”…The author presents similar selected quotes from that 1952 article of Peter Drucker, all of which remain as relevant today as they were in 1952.

We now watch one of the latest ASQ TV  episodes:

• The Hidden Factory – In this episode, learn about the concept of the hidden factory and how it can affect any organization regardless of industry. And discover how it can create misleading metrics that cause productivity to outrun quality.

Jim L. Smith’s Jim’s Gems posting for May, 2018 is:

• Solving Difficult Problems – Dr. Peter Carruthers, one-time head of theoretical physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said that our unconscious is an important factor in solving problems….This means that while you certainly need to collect all the information possible, at some point it’s important to back off, relax, and trust that creative, productive mental work will continue even if you’re not aware of it. Sometimes “letting off the gas pedal”, leaves space for creative juices to flow….People who won’t relax their dependence on concrete, countable information often just can’t see possibilities that don’t fit into what they already know.

I look forward to your inputs / criticisms/ observations to enhance the utility of our Quality Management Blog Carnival.

Note: The images depicted here above are through courtesy of respective websites who have the copyrights for the respective images.