Value-Driven Quality

Abstract

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) criteria represent a fundamental set of key business processes that should form the management system for any quality-minded organization. The criteria are based on 11 core values and concepts that characterize the culture of total quality organizations: however, the relationships between these core values and the management processes embedded in the criteria are not well understood. Since it is management processes that reflect the culture of an organization, then—from the view of the Baldrige Award—understanding those processes (the outward view of an organization's culture) provides better insight to the values that drive behavior (the inward view of an organization's culture).In this article, the expertise of a sample of Baldrige Award examiners is drawn upon to gain insight on the relationship between the core values and key processes. The results are used to propose a quantitative approach for better understanding how strongly the core values are reflected in an organization's culture based on Baldrige Award assessment scores. Although the quantitative results are only preliminary, the process of mapping core values to management processes leads to better understanding of the criteria. The results raise some important issues for national, state, and local examiner training, and suggest several future research directions.