What Can be Learned at Residency

Organizational Culture AA The implications of using criteria, such as Baldrige, in assessing organizational culture needs are that the criteria serve as “a tool for understanding and managing organizational performance” (NIST, 2015). In other words, the organizational culture can be assessed, using the criteria, which allows the company to measure and manage performance. If the culture is facilitating growth in performance, the company can deduce that the culture is doing well.

The criteria consist of a set of questions that the company asks itself to better understand its performance and how it operates from within. Any criteria can help the company to become more introspective and reflective on how it builds relationships among workers, between workers and managers, how it motivates employees, what type of incentives factor into performance goals being met and so on. The company sets itself up in a position to excel by using criteria to assess its organizational culture.

The company essentially states that it desires to know itself better and to see behind the curtain of operations to understand why the company behaves, performance-wise, in the manner that it does. It is no different from a couple going to marriage counseling and answering a series of questions designed to get the spouses to think more deeply about themselves and how they react or respond to certain situations, stressors, incentives, settings, obstacles, challenges, opportunities, and experiences.

The endpoint is the same—to enhance performance and to develop a richer culture in which all stakeholders can benefit. In a company that does not perform a criteria-based assessment of its organizational culture, there is likely to be a lack of self-knowledge and a number of stumbling blocks preventing the company from reaching its fullest potential. BB My organization, a health care chain that operates across the northwest, could benefit from a leadership assessment.

I would systematically collect and analyze data on its organizational leadership using the structured questionnaire, which Tsai (2011) recommends as an effective method for obtaining data from stakeholders within an organization and identifying relationships between culture, leadership and job satisfaction. Knowing where to apply the questionnaire and among which stakeholders (executives, lower level managers, employees, clients, etc.) could be determined by first conducting an internal and external assessment to see exactly what is going on both inside and outside the company.

Knowing what best practices are conducted in the industry and what the industry standard is in terms of leadership can be helpful in analyzing the data that is collected, too, from the structured questionnaire. The group that is surveyed will provide responses to the questions that are asked and these questions can be analyzed according to a variety of methods, depending on what variables or standards the questionnaire is designed to collect information about.

If the responses are open-ended, content analysis could be conducted and common themes identified among the population responding the questionnaire. If the responses are closed and measured by the Likert scale on a 1-5 range, the data could be statistically analyzed, with mean and standard deviation of the mean identified. Other statistical tests could be conducted to better understand the relationship between variables.

The main point of the conducting the leadership assessment would be to see whether the organization’s leaders are meeting industry standards, exceeding them, or failing them. The assessment could be useful in making further decisions about the direction of the organization in terms of management. CC What I learned at Residency that will influence my dissertation research is the need to really focus on an idea and define it clearly so that it can be researched deeply and fully.

Sometimes, ideas come to us and they are ambiguous or vague—not fully developed—and as they are researched they morph into different ideas or become bigger and unwieldy. The research can uncover topics that were never considered before and suddenly the student is overwhelmed by information that he did not have access to initially because he was unaware of it existing.

The problem of focusing on a single issue and identifying an issue that needs to be addressed is something that I have learned at Residency and I believe this will influence my dissertation research. I can draw on my experience of narrowing down a thesis so that it has clearly defined parameters. The narrowing down of research onto a specific subject, with inclusion and exclusion criteria formulated so that one can know what types of studies will.