No abstract

Top management commitment is considered a significant factor in improvement programmes, and many papers have been written about the role of top management commitment in implementing a quality management system. However, not considering other management levels' commitment, such as middle management, may lead to issues in achieving organisational development. Public organisations that work through vertical structures may face a lack of middle management commitment, which might have a negative impact on lower and non-management staff commitment to improvement programmes. In this regard, this study seeks to examine the impact of middle management's commitment towards improvement initiatives in public organisations. Methodology: Empirical research with a mixed-method design used semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire to explore the current practices of continuous improvement (CI) and examine employees' views from different management levels of the implications of current improvements in a Saudi public service organisation. Findings: The analysis indicated that the lower managers and non-management staff agree that, after the implementation of the quality management system, the organisation's middle management showed a lack of commitment to that system. Moreover, this lack of commitment is recognised in the analysis of participants' views of CI practices recorded in the questionnaire and interviews. This lack of commitment has caused poor employee commitment and thus a lack of problem solving in organisational departments. It is also responsible for a lack of employee involvement, the centralisation of decisions, deficiencies in terms of determining and applying training, inequality between employees and a lack of trust between employees and their managers. These issues could be managed and resolved through middle management and their commitment. Practical implications: Increasing middle managers' awareness of the importance of their commitment to improvement initiatives can have an impact on employees' commitment towards improvement initiatives, especially in those public organisations that have vertical/hierarchical structures. The level of commitment towards the implementation of improvement programmes needs further in-depth analyses to identify which factors influence public organisation leaders' commitment to improvement programmes. Value: The results of this study could motivate middle managers in public organisations to review their policies and to facilitate CI initiatives.

Self‐assessment using the Business Excellence Model has been in place in Europe since 1990 as a means of obtaining competitive advantage. Describes the history, design and application of the model and self‐assessment in the context of the desire of all organizations to strive for excellence. Emphasizes is on self‐assessment but reference is made to the use of the model of self‐assessment to identify model organizations through the UK Quality Award (UKQA) and European Quality Award (EQA) processes.

Integration of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) into a company's mainstream strategy is a complex task. Practical implementation of CSR requires analysis of both the external and internal environments to determine the prospects and challenges significantly influencing integration of sustainability into business strategy. In order to overcome limitations of single multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) models, this article proposes a hybrid integrated framework combining cognitive mapping (CM), and analytic networks process (ANP) to determine, prioritise and select CSR programmes for implementation. The strategic cognitive map serves as a foundation to build the ANP network and identify the importance of CSR programmes. A knapsack optimisation method is then used to optimally assign resources to CSR alternatives. We demonstrate the usefulness of the framework through a case study in the extractive sector. The framework was empirically tested with 61 respondents using postal and online surveys, MBA workshops and conference networking.

There is no formalized approach for problem structuring and quantitative decision support to operationalise Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) implementation. In this paper, techniques for considering criteria relationships are outlined and a holistic, systematic framework combining a qualitative and quantitative method for practical CSR integration is provided. Cognitive mapping (CM) is applied to structure the problem picture, and the cause effect relationships between decision elements. Soft CM methodology is employed to assess the cross-criteria interactions, at both an individual and a collective level. The interactions of criteria can have a significant impact upon CSR implementation. Such impacts can be direct or indirect through their close linkages to other criteria. The causal strategic map serves as an input to the Analytic Network Process (ANP) to carry out the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). Then, CM and ANP are applied in a comparative analysis to verify whether the measures of criteria significance do correspond. The key criteria in networks are identified using centrality in CM and single limited priorities in ANP. This study demonstrates that using criteria without considering their interactions will result in shortcomings in the evaluation and assessment of CSR programmes. The holistic framework, combining CM and ANP proposed in this work, enhances the process of problem structuring and supports preference-based evaluation of decision alternatives. The results of our study yield that the mapping procedure has an influence on the criteria significance in networks. The correspondence between CM and ANP is stronger when cause-relationships are rigidly interpreted. More unambiguous interpretations of causal relations can be achieved if methods are used jointly and common peaks of importance in both CM and ANP could potentially serve as indications of key decision elements.