Total Quality Management (TQM) is described in five steps. For this interactive

Total Quality Management (TQM) is described in five steps. For this interactive assignment, you will take on the role of an internal consultant for a large internet provider that has been tasked with presenting a TQM plan to the Director of Technical Support. The organization is currently experiencing issues in their customer technical support program. The issues include long hold times, customer complaints that require more than one call to resolve, and concerns that tech support repeatedly has to elevate a large number of their calls to a higher level.
Using the five steps provided in your textbook, create a 10 to 12 PowerPoint-slide presentation in which you provide a high-level overview of a TQM plan for the Director.
Your PowerPoint presentation should include the following elements:
Identify customers (internal and external) and what they value.
Identify products and/or services and determine which are most valued by customers.
Create a basic flowchart of the current processes.
Provide suggestions for improvement and explain how these suggestions will address the current issue.
Create a flow chart of how the processes should look based on your suggestions for improvement.
Support your TQM plan with scholarly and/or credible sources.
Include visual enhancements in your presentation. These may include: appropriate images, a consistent font, appropriate animations, and transitions from content piece-to-content piece and slide-to-slide. It is recommended that you access Garr Reynolds Top Ten Slide Tips Links to an external site. that provides useful assistance with creating successful PowerPoint presentations.
After you have created your PowerPoint, you will create a screencast of your PowerPoint presentation using the screencasting software or platform of your choice. For the screencast portion, you may use any screencasting platform you wish. (Quick-start guides for Screencast-O-Matic Download Screencast-O-Matic, and Jing Download Jing are provided for your convenience.)
Your screencast may be three-five minutes long, but may not exceed five minutes. (It is highly recommended that you create a scriipt and/or speaker’s notes for your PowerPoint to ensure that your screencast will meet the time requirements.
****The screen class I will do just need the speaker notes done.
Chapter 12 TQM:
\”Target 1: Individual Integration
Repeatedly over the past 20 years of research, M&A activity has been noted for the significant psychological stress it places on employees, described variously as a sense of loss, anger, anxiety, uncertainty, and grief. Individuals experiencing these emotions are likely to exhibit increased conflict, low motivation, and greater mental and physical illness, while for the organization this translates to absenteeism, turnover, and low productivity, among other outcomes (Cartwright & Cooper, 1993; Seo & Hill, 2005).
Early on in the acquisition process, concerns are naturally very personal. “People’s first reaction to a merger is to think of their own interests: They become preoccupied with what the deal means for their jobs, livelihood, and careers” (Marks & Mirvis, 1992, p. 20). Once the “survivors” are confirmed, at a similarly very basic level the logistics of the job become important. Technology, facilities, telephones, badges, signage, and business cards have the potential to easily disrupt productivity if not handled accurately and swiftly. Policy and procedure questions that were once routine and mundane to answer are now time-consuming and disruptive to address. Employees’ time and attention are thus directed away from everyday work activities to solving basic problems of getting set up with basic needs and finding answers to their procedural questions. More dangerous to the integration process, however, is the natural tendency for employees to respond to the vacuum of information by returning to familiar ways, old processes, tools, and systems. In this respect, one very obvious barrier to individual integration is poor handling of onboarding and orientation activities.
Interventions for Individual Integration
“Focusing on the individual earlier in the due diligence process can yield significant long-term benefits,” writes Tim Merrifield (2006, p. 11), reflecting on his experience with research and development talent integration at Cisco. Seo and Hill (2005) identify a number of prescriiptions to help individuals cope with the stress of individual transitions, including counseling and social support, disengagement efforts, or grieving meetings in which individuals can share feelings of uncertainty and anxiety with others experiencing similar emotions, and two-way communication with leaders. Not all communication is useful, however. In particular, in one study of information adequacy during a merger, researchers found that communication sessions promoted job satisfaction only when the communication sessions were carefully designed and concerned matters employees were truly anxious about (such as how decisions are made and what aspects of their jobs will be changing; Zhu, May, & Rosenfeld, 2004).
Collective socialization tactics (such as those that occur in onboarding sessions, new employee orientations, and new manager orientations), in which employees and managers participate in group learning, provide opportunities to socialize with peers. Such activities have been shown to increase embeddedness (i.e., increased connections to the job and organization) and reduce turnover among newcomers in at least one study (Allen, 2006), though this study did not focus on acquisition onboarding specifically.
Target 2: Team Integration
As new teams form following an acquisition, managers and team members “have to face the consequences of high-level decisions about work-unit charters, structures, and systems” (Marks & Mirvis, 1992, p. 21). Newly acquired employees may not understand the purpose, goals, or direction of the new team or their role in it. The team’s charter or mission may have changed due to the acquisition as well, and even existing (pre-acquisition) team members are likely to have questions about their responsibilities and how the new team members will fit with existing roles and processes. The result can be long and unproductive cycles of trial and error, where team members struggle to determine who makes what decisions, miss important handoffs, duplicate work unnecessarily among team members who do not understand or respect one another’s roles or responsibilities, or engage in ineffective communication patterns.
However, managers often fail to recognize that even comparatively small transitions in team membership (just one or a few members joining or leaving) will change team dynamics, as members question what will happen to the work that a departing member used to do, or what role the new member(s) will play. Managers, perhaps pressured to get on with the team’s tasks, tend to throw new members into the team and expect them to pick things up as time goes on. Since both new and tenured team members are working through Bridges’s (1980) classic stages of endings and new beginnings (as we discussed in Chapter 10), failing to pay conscious attention to the transition will slow down the team integration process.
Interventions for Team Integration
We already discussed a number of team interventions in Chapter 11, so there is no need to duplicate them all here. In an acquisition, it may be even more important to conduct team interventions early on in the life of the team in order to clarify changes in team membership, goals, purpose, roles, and expectations about team norms such as meetings, decision making, leadership, and communication. One intervention in particular—team start-up or transition meetings—can be effective in an acquisition to start teams off quickly and can increase acquired employees’ identification with their new teams.
Target 3: Cross-Team/Department Integration
Recent research confirms that the longer a group has been together, the greater the feeling of loss of the historical identity, the greater the resistance to a merger or acquisition, and the more actively members will work to protect and maintain the former identity (Jetten & Hutchison, 2011). Interestingly, participants in that study felt less resistance when they were allowed to retain their pre-merger group names. Similarly, Colman and Lunnan (2011) found that strong identification with a former company increases employees’ resistance to new processes and approaches they are now more likely to see as substandard. These findings underscore social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1985), which proposes that a significant part of our identity is developed and shaped by the social groups to which we belong.
The pragmatic advantages of this identification, of course, are that team members who hold a strong sense of team identity are more likely to engage with fellow team members in team goals to achieve shared outcomes. In a merger or acquisition, however, this same sense of ingroup identity can have “tribal” consequences as fighting between internal teams overtakes cooperation. McGee-Cooper (2005) notes that in an acquisition, “new hires and old hands face off. The company treats new people as foreign and ‘dangerous’ . . . as the tribe closes ranks to defend against new ideas and cultural differences” (p. 14). Much research attributes inter- and intrateam conflicts to cultural differences, which “tend to grow into aversive feelings in situations of direct confrontation, sometimes triggering a vicious cycle” (Bijlsma-Frankema, 2001, p. 194). Rather than working cooperatively in the new organization, teams or functions now see themselves as pitted against one another in competition, a phenomenon that may become even more prevalent when organizations structure the acquired company as a stand-alone entity or choose to maintain the acquired company’s old department structures in the new company. The addition of new functions, bolted onto the pre-acquisition structure (for example, a new product engineering group) may now create confusion about which department handles which tasks, how charters overlap, where tasks intersect and handoffs must occur, where power lies in decision making, or how information is to be shared between divisions.
In addition, leaders of the new organization must reflect a common understanding and shared commitment to the strategies, plans, and goals of the combined organization. This highlights the importance of relationships among the leadership and management community where these issues can be openly shared, discussed, and decided. For the acquired manager, challenges exist in communicating to the division when employees require information about transitions from old to new. One study noted that acquired managers face a contradictory role in which they have to maintain old processes, networks, and relationships but simultaneously adapt and negotiate these in a new context (Chreim & Tafaghod, 2012). Chreim and Tafaghod (2012) found that a critical factor in acquisition integration success for these managers was the quality of the relationships among acquired and acquiring managers. In successful integrations, managers had positive, constructive, and frequent interaction, whereas those integrations that were unsuccessful were marked by new–old manager relationships that displayed either apathy or counterproductive interaction.
Interventions for Cross-Team/Department Integration
First, OD practitioners can aid leaders in managing intergroup conflict between intact teams that existed prior to the acquisition and newly acquired teams. Organization mirror activities (where perceptions of similarities and differences between groups are thoughtfully exchanged in a facilitated session), joint problem-solving workshops, and microcosm groups (where a subset of members of each group negotiate solutions to process problems) can all be effective in increasing intergroup contact and reducing stereotypes of other teams. To help organizational members learn to work more effectively together, Tetenbaum (1999) recommends that a superordinate goal be established that requires employees from both organizations to collaborate (as we discussed in Chapter 11). As you know, intergroup contact alone is not likely to reduce conflicts, but it can do so when the teams develop a shared ownership of a goal to which they are both committed. Leaders of both groups can agree on a combined strategy, facilitated by OD practitioners skilled in strategic planning and goal setting.
Leadership development activities can provide leaders and managers with increased skills in managing cross-functional challenges. Following Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, cross-team collaboration became critical as the integrated company sought to increase its leadership skills to compete in new markets. Morris (2009) outlines the development of the Adobe Leadership Experience that set expectations for both pre- and postacquisition leaders with a common set of leadership attributes and values. Leadership development sessions, including the assignment of a “buddy” system for acquired and acquiring managers, can also provide opportunities for increasing networking and management contact.
Target 4: Organizationwide Integration
In large acquisitions, before the legal combination takes place, it is common for leaders and the transition team to determine how the organizations will be operationally combined. This includes an initial set of decisions about how processes will be integrated, which employees will be retained and which will not, how reporting relationships will be structured, and much more. Barkema and Schijven (2008) note that this stage typically demands more decisions to be made than the organization can optimally handle. As a result, some decisions are quickly made on a pragmatic basis (e.g., “We’ll just leave the two different product maintenance organizations intact”).
In the integration stage, as the organization’s capacity to address these issues increases, new information usually comes to light that provides more data for effective decision making. (Overlap between the two product maintenance organizations now becomes increasingly apparent.) This research suggests that continual monitoring and adjustment following the close of the combination is a key competency in achieving a successful merger or acquisition. Indeed, Barkema and Schijven (2008) note that “acquirers are typically unable to optimally integrate acquisitions the first time around” (p. 702) and that “restructuring plays an important role in more fully realizing the potential of the firm’s acquisitions” (p. 715). Importantly, they note that postacquisition decisions about organization design are not a “one-shot game, but a process that extends far beyond” initial integration efforts (p. 715). During the integration process, new capabilities or opportunities may be realized that require leaders to rethink previous decisions about the organization’s design to truly realize the benefits of the acquisition.
Interventions for Organizationwide Integration
Organization design work early in the process and in the years following the acquisition is important. Jasinski (2010), writing about MetLife’s organization design and acquisition process, argues that “sound organization design, applied from early in the acquisition process through implementation, can be an effective catalyst for ensuring that the structure, process, governance, metrics, and people are optimally configured and aligned to fulfill the strategy of the newly integrated organizations” (p. 6). Supporting the research findings above, in the MetLife process “organization design activity peaks during M&A integration planning, subsides after integration, and then spikes later as the longitudinal effects of the design are observed and adjustments are indicated” (p. 9).
As day-to-day integration challenges fade in the months following the acquisition, leaders are likely to ask, for example: “Where are we failing to see value from this acquisition?” “What untapped potential remains?” “What might the next step be in our evolution?” These broad questions are likely to force them to rethink strategies, reporting structures, processes, and more. Skilled OD practitioners can work with leaders to help them through organization design questions in a structured process. Questions about the future and the organization’s vision of it can imply the benefits of participative, large-group interventions that can engage employees from both the acquiring and acquired organizations.
Table 12.2 summarizes just a few of the interventions mentioned in this section. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the kinds of problems that can occur at these levels, nor is it a comprehensive list of OD interventions that practitioners might use to address them. Because of the complexity of mergers and acquisitions, organization development practitioners can add maximum value to the integration stage of mergers and acquisitions through a diversity of approaches that address multiple targets—maintaining attention simultaneously on the development of individuals, teams, departments, and the organization as a whole in what clearly involves a high-touch, resource-intensive effort. One possible approach would involve forming a combined OD team, composed of practitioners in both the acquired and acquiring organizations, to collaborate. Practitioners with expertise in each organization and target area can join forces to develop a comprehensive postintegration organization development strategy. This approach has the benefit of putting the practitioner team in the shoes of the clients they are working to support (forming a team, negotiating roles and processes, observing cultural differences, and collaborating across organizations), allowing the practitioners to experience similar challenges to those of their clients.
Transorganization or Interorganization Development
A special circumstance in organization development describes the application of OD concepts to situations in which multiple organizations join together in networks or collaborative relationships with a shared purpose (Cummings, 1984). They are referred to as transorganizational systems, or “meta-organizations” (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008). Many observers have noted that these kinds of relationships are increasing in frequency, but that the field of organization development has been slow to understand the unique challenges involved in these relationships (Clarke, 2005; Cummings, 1984). Ahrne and Brunsson (2008) estimate that there are upwards of 200,000 meta-organizations in Europe alone.
Table 12.2 OD Interventions That Address Common Integration Problems
Table 12.2 OD Interventions That Address Common Integration Problems
 
Individual Integration
Team Integration
Cross-Team/Department Integration
Organization Integration
Goal
Support employees through acquisition stress and foundational needs, and develop employee engagement
Form productive teams
Develop cooperative interactions between leaders and teams
Remove gridlock and promote future potential
Interventions
Onboarding sessionsNew employee orientationNew manager orientationTwo-way communication sessions
Team start-up meetingsManager development to foster team transitions
Intergroup/interteam interventionsStrategic planning and goal setting to jointly develop superordinate goalsLeadership development to promote cross-functional networks and shared values
Organization designLarge-group interventions
Multiple organizations may enter together into interorganizational relationships (also called transorganizational systems and collaborative networks) “to exchange or pool their resources, or they may decide to work together toward some common and mutually agreed upon end, or they may collaboratively produce a new product or service” (Alter & Hage, 1993, p. 2). Sometimes these multiple organization systems arise to address problems and challenges that none could solve independently, perhaps because each did not have the resources to solve the problem or because the organizations are interdependent and must cooperate to solve it (Chisholm, 2000). Examples of these multiple organization relationships include the following:
Joint ventures for new products or servicesConsortia to develop industry standardsProduction networksPublic-private partnerships, such as those in education or health careCo-ops or purchasing networksTrade agreements, associations, or unionsJoint research and development consortiaLobbying associations of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations
Each of these types of transorganizational system (TS) differs in how it is organized. For example, in the development of a joint venture, two or three organizations may meet periodically to determine who will handle which responsibility and how they will work together to meet each organization’s objective. Perhaps one may do research and development while the other does manufacturing. In other situations, such as in a trade association or industry standards consortia, there may be yet another new organization formed with representatives from each of the participating organizations. (The United Nations would be such an example.) In still other situations, organizations may participate in name alone, or they may have only an economic relationship such as in a purchasing network.
For example, Chisholm (2008) describes a system that developed in Romania in the 1990s called the Collaborative Alliance for Romanian Orphans. Hundreds of organizations from around the world joined in a consortium to provide relief to an estimated 140,000 orphans left in state institutions. They shared the goals of providing emergency relief and improving the health care system, and in a short time trained hundreds of medical professionals and cared for tens of thousands of children. Shuman and Twombly (2010) suggest that these collaborative networks have the advantage of agility as each organization participating in the network brings capabilities that no single organization possesses.
Transorganizational systems develop in a three-step process of identification, convention, and organization (Cummings, 1984). Each of these stages presents distinct topics of concern:
Identification. The focus is on the reason for forming the TS as well as finding and inviting members who have a stake in the issue or concern to participate. Because different groups will see the problem differently, they may have different ideas about the problem’s scope and boundaries, so identifying relevant members and establishing the scope of the relationship can be difficult.Convention. This second stage consists of soliciting input on each member’s perception of the problem, members’ objectives and motivations to join, and developing a commitment to taking action to address the issue.Organization. Members explore and agree on the desired future they would like to see, including actions each would agree to take to reach that future. Some have used the search conference methodology described earlier to do so (Clarke, 2005; Trist, 1985). Participants develop working arrangements on topics such as communication preferences, norms of participation, decision making, leadership, and structure. For example, what decisions and actions can the TS take on behalf of its members without explicit permission?
From one perspective, problems in these relationships can be addressed with a number of the strategies described in Chapter 11 on single-group interventions, such as new team formation activities and team-building interventions. However, transorganizational systems also have special characteristics that make the application of traditional OD interventions particularly challenging and in many cases demand a different approach, For example:
 1. Hierarchy and structure are different in transorganizational systems from those in typical organizations. In many cases, group members participate on equal footing with no hierarchical relationship between them, and no higher-level “manager” to resolve disputes. Members must conduct their own activities in a self-regulating fashion (Chisholm, 2000). Some have suggested that transorganizational systems are “underorganized” (L. D. Brown, 1980; Cummings, 1984), meaning that participants are only loosely tied to one another, with vaguely defined purposes and few or no policies or formal procedures. In these situations, change strategies should “increase organization of the system” (L. D. Brown, 1980, p. 190) such as “increasing shared norms and values, and designing structures, roles, and technologies to create predictability and regularity” (Cummings, 1984, p. 399).
 2. Membership relationships are unique compared with most organizations in which employees all have the same relationship (or similar relationships) to the organization. Membership in a transorganizational system can be voluntary, as in the case of a cooperative production network or international political body, in which case participation and engagement of all members is a primary concern. In these cases, it helps to know members’ motivations for participating and individual members’ goals and objectives. Different members may have different objectives and desires for the system, some of which may conflict. Participation can also be involuntary or mandated by regulation or law, where conflict may be more apparent (Cummings, 1984). In both cases, members of the transorganizational system also are members of their “home” organization, and often must report back to it or get official permission from it to act on the home organization’s behalf. Consequently, negotiations and agreements often involve several rounds of discussion. Change agents working with these systems can help to define decision processes so that members are clear about what levels of agreement are required.
 3. Trust and collaboration are special concerns in transorganizational systems (Vangen & Huxham, 2003), and political issues are likely and can be highly charged. For example, competitors may decide cooperatively to join together and come to agreement on joint industry standards because the market demands it, but each has a separate interest in its own success. Members may suspect other members’ motives and hidden agendas for their choices, contributions, or opinions. Lobbying, vote-trading, power struggles, and coalitions are likely results. Vangen and Huxham (2003) write that trust and collaboration can be developed in these systems through a gradual cyclical process of trust building, taking risks, managing power imbalances and dynamics, and achieving modest incremental successes as a foundation for further trust. They also note that it may not be possible to build a highly trusting relationship in these systems and that the system must learn how to manage with this situation.
Shuman and Twombly (2010) note that these network relationships are maintained through a leadership role they call the “network choreographer,” who organizes participants and develops and maintains network relationships. In a strategic alliance, for example, members who represent the various partnership organizations can be considered to hold the choreographer roles. The choreographer role acts as an entrepreneur and liaison between the parties to ensure that the members of the network continue to receive value from the relationship. Choreographers must also be (1) entrepreneurs, “to hold the vision and be comfortable with the ambiguity inherent in creating and growing something new” (pp. 7–8); (2) passionate advocates, who can persuade others of the vision of the collaboration; (3) coaches and mentors, “working with senior leadership to guide them in understanding the implications of some of their actions and decisions” (p. 8); and (4) indefatigable communicators, who can “bridge silos that exist in traditional organizations and create links between organizations” (p. 8).
The growing presence of interorganizational designs (whether we call them transorganizational systems, networks, or some other term) will continue to offer an opportunity and a challenge for organization development practitioners to help choreographers and network members engage in productive and collaborative relationships.
\”