Discuss and Explain the managerial tool of management by walking around (MBWA) and its impact on creating a strategy ready culture. Write a 2 page paper addressing the following elements in your paper: ? Discuss and Explain the managerial tool of management by walking around (MBWA) and its impact on creating a strategy ready culture.
Discuss and Explain the managerial tool of management by walking around (MBWA) and its impact on creating a strategy ready culture.
Write a 2 page paper addressing the following elements in your paper:
? Discuss and Explain the managerial tool of management by walking around (MBWA) and its impact on creating a strategy ready culture.
Include a title page and 3-5 references. Only one reference may be from the internet (not Wikipedia). The other references must be from the attached. Please adhere to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), (6th ed. 2nd printing) when writing and submitting assignments and papers.
The paper needs to be grammarly correct, plagiarism free, and APA style correct.
The Effectiveness of Management-By-Walking-Around:
A Randomized Field Study
Anita L. Tucker
Harvard Business School, Soldiers Field Road, Morgan Hall 413, Boston, Massachusetts 02163, USA, atucker@hbs.edu
Sara J. Singer
Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA, ssinger@hsph.harvard.edu
Management-by-walking-around (MBWA) is a widely adopted technique in hospitals that involves senior managers
directly observing frontline work. However, few studies have rigorously examined its impact on organizational outcomes.
This study examines an improvement program based on MBWA in which senior managers observe frontline
employees, solicit ideas about improvement opportunities, and work with staff to resolve the issues. We randomly
selected hospitals to implement the 18-month-long, MBWA-based improvement program; 56 work areas participated. We
find that the program, on average, had a negative impact on performance. To explain this surprising finding, we use
mixed methods to examine the impact of the work area?s problem-solving approach. Results suggest that prioritizing
easy-to-solve problems was associated with improved performance. We believe this was because it resulted in greater
action-taking. A different approach was characterized by prioritizing high-value problems, which was not successful in
our study. We also find that assigning to senior managers responsibility for ensuring that identified problems get resolved
resulted in better performance. Overall, our study suggests that senior managers? physical presence in their organizations?
front lines was not helpful unless it enabled active problem solving.
Key words: health care; implementation research; patient safety; quality improvement; survey research
History: Received: February 2013; Accepted: January 2014 by Edward G. Anderson, Jr. after 2 revisions
1. Introduction
