Do all staff members need to share the same purpose?

2020

ABAS

Self Cite

It has been reported that the use of key phrases that all staff share a common understanding of is effective for integration inside an organization. At the Rakuwakai Otowa Hospital, however, integration failed due to the long-standing use of the terms "for the patient" and "patient first." The staff had assigned different meanings depending on their profession to these terms based on which they had built successful track records for their profession. That experience acted as an inertia preventing changes in attitudes and behaviors and ended up accelerating individually optimal activities for each profession. It is not merely a matter of staff across units simply using the same key phrases; it is important to reduce the ambiguity of the key phrases through behavior.

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A trap when using common key phrases

2020

ABAS

Self Cite

“…Abe (2018a) and others have observed many hospitals that made improvements from the standpoint of a single profession.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Leader's episodic change and followers' continuous change

2019

ABAS

Self Cite

In a review of the existing literature dealing with organizational change, Weick and Quinn (1999) asserted that the contrasting organizational changes of episodic change and continuous change reflect the perspective of the observer. That is, an organizational change can be explained and described as being an episodic change or a continuous change; however, no specific examples were given. The example of change in the Rakuwakai Otowa Hospital discussed in this paper is explained by a leader as being an episodic change, but the same situation is described by a staff member, who is a follower, as being a continuous change.

Do all staff members need to share the same purpose?

2018

ABAS

Self Cite

It is said that when an organization embarks on a new activity, the entire organization needs to be on board with the organizational purpose of that activity. However, in the case of Hospital X, which implemented kaizen, even though the purposes of kaizen differed across workers, the usefulness of these new activities was communicated as being shared purposes (a) among workers in the same division where superiors and subordinates work closely together and (b) among workers performing the same jobs but in different divisions. Thus, the new activities were adopted by the entire organization without having a common organizational purpose.