Organizational Development Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Organizational Development - Assignment Example Advocates of TQM hold that the goal of customer satisfaction is achieved through top management commitment to creating an organizational climate that empowers employees and focuses all efforts on the goal of customer satisfaction. A positive relationship between leadership and commitment, and employee empowerment (leading to job satisfaction) with customer satisfaction is assumed. Both the trade and academic literatures on TQM suggest many different top leadership strategies and practices for empowering or involving employees in quality-related decision-making processes. However, few empirical studies, outside of the Malcolm Baldridge Award program, have been done to sufficiently document these relationships and to determine which of the many suggested strategies and practices are effective in bringing about the intended results (employee empowerment, job satisfaction, and superior customer satisfaction). The objective of this study is to provide empirical assessment of the assumed relationship between top management leadership and commitment, employee empowerment, job satisfaction, and customer satisfaction. ... Another objective is to provide empirical assessment for the TQM-based literature. Literature review In almost all of the TQM literature, employee involvement, empowerment, and top management leadership and commitment are identified as crucial elements of a successful TQM program (Bowen, Siehl, & Schneider, 1989; Brower, 1994; Camp, 1989; Deming, 1982; Mendelowitz, 1991; Roberts, 1994; Senge, 1994). Lawler (1994) referred to employee empowerment as one of the most important tenets of TQM. Thomas and Velthouse (1990) define empowerment "as intrinsic task motivation that manifests itself in four cognitions reflecting an individual's orientation to his or her work roles." By intrinsic task motivation, they mean "positively valued experiences that an individual derives directly from a task that produce motivation and satisfaction." The four cognitions they identified are meaningfulness, competence, impact, and choice. Meaningfulness is the value of the task goal or purpose in relation to the individual's own ideals or standards, and competence is the degree to which a person can perform task activities skillfully. Impact, on the other hand, is the degree to which behavior is seen as making a difference in terms of accomplishing the purpose of the task, while choice is the causal responsibility for a person's actions. A more operational-level and process-oriented definition of empowerment was offered by Bowen and Lawler (1992). They define empowerment "as sharing with front-line employees information about an organization's performance, information about rewards based on the organization's performance, knowledge that enables employees to understand and contribute to organizational performance, and giving