This study examined the process of third-party scoring of organizational self-assessments. An experiment was conducted to illustrate the magnitude of score consistency and accuracy among evaluators, estimate the impact of frame-of-reference (FOR) training on score consistency and accuracy, and explore the relationship between evaluator characteristics and score accuracy. The organizational self-assessment used was the 1995 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Colony Fasteners Case Study. The subjects were 81 graduate students enrolled in two televised graduate engineering courses with considerable quality management content. Subjects were randomly assigned to groups and randomly assigned to four of the seven categories of the Baldrige Award. Each subject evaluated the case study against two categories prior to the treatment. Subjects in the control group evaluated two additional categories and then a two and one-half hour FOR training intervention was provided to all subjects. Next, subjects in the treatment group evaluated their two additional categories. Finally, a questionnaire was administered regarding evaluator characteristics related to previous experience and education. Accuracy was assessed by comparing subjects’ scores to experts’ scores and calculating indices (elevation and dimensional accuracy) for each subject’s scores on each category. Prior to training, no statistical differences were found between groups, but a leniency effect was observed for all subjects. Category 6.0, Business Results, and Category 7.0, Customer Focus and Satisfaction, had statistically smaller score variances than the other five categories. After training, group x time ANOVAs found evidence of an interaction. Examination of simple effects found significant differences between the group mean scores for all three items from Category 6.0 and two of the four items from Category 5.0. Significant simple time effects were found for all three items from Category 6.0 for the treatment group. No meaningful differences were found between group score variances. A significant difference in category score variance was seen across categories for the untrained group. Training improved elevation accuracy, but no evidence was seen of effects on DA. Exploratory regression produced a prediction equation for DA with an adjusted R-square of 0.538. Predictors included work experience, QA/QC experience, employer’s industry and employer’s size. / Ph. D.

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Published Article / In today's highly competitive business environment service delivery has become a key issue. Providing quality service could enhance an organisation's competitive advantage with beneficial financial implications. Service delivery requires the full cooperation and commitment of all the employees in the organisation, including management. The culture of the organisation supports this by eliciting a unified response from employees that supports the quality of service rendered to customers. In this regard the paper provides a statistical analysis of the impact of organisational culture on service delivery in a major South African private security company. Due to its applicability the Competing Values Framework (CVF) was instrumental in measuring the culture of the organisation and the award winning Baldrige Award Criteria in ascertaining its levels of service delivery.

The business performance management (BPM) framework helps an organization continuously adjust and successfully execute its strategies. BPM helps increase flexibility by providing managers with an early alert about changes and, as a result, allows faster response to such changes. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) framework provides a basis for self-assessment and a systems perspective for managing an organization's key processes for achieving business results. The MBNQA framework is a more comprehensive framework and encapsulates the underlying constructs in the BPM framework. The objectives of this dissertation are fourfold: (1) to validate the underlying relationships presented in the 2008 MBNQA framework, (2) to explore the MBNQA framework at the dimension level, and develop and test constructs measured at that level in a causal model, (3) to validate and create a common general framework for the business performance model by integrating the practitioner literature with basic theory including existing MBNQA theory, and (4) to integrate the BPM framework and the MBNQA framework into a new framework (BPM-MBNQA framework) that can guide organizations in their journey toward achieving and sustaining competitive and strategic advantages. The purpose of this study is to achieve these objectives by means of a combination of methodologies including literature reviews, expert opinions, interviews, presentation feedbacks, content analysis, and latent semantic analysis. An initial BPM framework was developed based on the reviews of literature and expert opinions. There is a paucity of academic research on business performance management. Therefore, this study reviewed the practitioner literature on BPM and from the numerous organization-specific BPM models developed a generic, conceptual BPM framework. With the intent of obtaining valuable feedback, this initial BPM framework was presented to Baldrige Award recipients (BARs) and selected academicians from across the United States who participated in the Fall Summit 2007 held at Caterpillar Financial Headquarter in Nashville, TN on October 1 and 2, 2007. Incorporating the feedback from that group allowed refining and improving the proposed BPM framework. This study developed a variant of the traditional latent semantic analysis (LSA) called causal latent semantic analysis (cLSA) that enables us to test causal models using textual data. This method was used to validate the 2008 MBNQA framework based on article abstracts on the Baldrige Award and program published in both practitioner and academic journals from 1987 to 2009. The cLSA was also used to validate the BPM framework using the full body text data from all articles published in the practitioner journal entitled the Business Performance Management Magazine since its inception in 2003. The results provide the first cLSA study of these frameworks. This is also the first study to examine all the causal relationships within the MBNQA and BPM frameworks.