Measuring Quality Orientation in Organisations: A Cognitive-Behavioural Approach

This paper explores the application of a cognitive-behavioural approach for measuring quality orientation in organisations. It aims at providing a method for improving the alignment of an organisation’s strategy with its culture. The explored and presented approach is called Situational Judgment Test (SJT) and is based on the Critical Incident Technique (CIT), a method to gather information about reoccurring human-system problems and their causes. Critical incidents allow the systematic identification of behaviour that contribute to success or failure in specific situations. Thereby, they form a solid basis for performance appraisals as well as personnel development and selection procedures. We followed a deductive test development approach and conducted two studies with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to validate the developed items. The SMEs evaluated 40 situational descriptions with regard to their degree of realism as well as relevance and assigned each situation to one predefined variable related to quality orientation. Analysis of the data led to the exclusion of 14 items. The interrater agreement for the remaining 26 items is considered as fair and reflects the difficulty associated with construct-based SJT development. For future research, the combination of critical incidents with Virtual Reality (VR) as simulation method appears to be promising for increasing fidelity. The presented cognitive-behavioural approach provides a novel method for measuring and strengthening organisation-wide quality initiatives, going beyond the implementation of established quality tools and techniques.