The Perception of Quality Based on Different Cultural Factors and Value Systems
Gearoid O'Suilleabhain and Mary Jordan DEIS, Ireland
Dr Richard Messnarz ISCN LTD, Ireland
Dr Miklos Biro Sztaki, Hungary
Ken Street Telematica LTD, UK
Also, most of the improvement experts neglect the reality that human factors, skills, and social and teamwork competencies have significant influences on success. This is contrary to the belief of many process people who feel that processes can make the company independent of people.
In previous publications we promoted the experience of 30 experts from 11 different European countries and proposed a combined use of methodologies. These experts worked together for 3 years (1995 to 1998) in a European Leonardo da Vinci Project PICO (Process Improvement Combined apprOach). In particular, we focussed on the combination of business aspects with pragmatic improvement approaches as an essential requirement in order to make the right improvement decisions.
Furthermore, in the last 3 years, in a follow up project Bestregit, we analysed and identified factors that further impede your improvement efforts even if the goals, the business context, the methodology and the plan for improvement are right. Human factors largely influence the behaviour of people, the effectiveness of teamwork, how the communication in the team works, and what can be achieved if the processes are right. And one of the basic (probably funny) things is that different groups, cultures, and professions understand the term “Quality” differently.
Key Words: Software Process Improvement, Business Improvement, Strategies, Human Factors, Return on Investment, Innovation
The iceberg metaphor shown in Figure 1 can be used to depict the contrasting aspects of organisational life.
Formal Organisation
Informal Organisation
The visible part of the iceberg shows the formal aspects of an organisation, while the informal aspects of an organisation hide under water. The informal part is the greater part of the organisational iceberg and will act to help or hinder an organisational process of change. It often leads to resistance to the change process.
The view of organisations existing as systems of interrelated elements operating in multi-dimensional environments is becoming widely accepted. Both publications [22] and [23] report about Political, Economic, Technological and Socio-cultural factors that influence organisations in their structures, strategies, management process and means of operating, including technology and individuals.
The typical starting situation in a Bestregit project was a strong informal organisation with internal rules and personal habits in place, where goals are just in the heads of some people and the common sense of teamwork is not understood. There are some heroes fighting alone and believing that they are the best in their job. It takes a while (at least as far as completing the step of the goal analysis) for people to start to recognise common goals and interest, understand the management mission, and begin to acknowledge that larger goals can be achieved by forming a critical mass of teamwork.
This was the situation at all field test sites in Spain, Austria and Ireland at the beginning of the Bestregit project. This situation has also been observed and measured in a consulting project in IT industry at a major German firm. See below Figure 2 [1].
Figure 2: Modelling Project - Data review (PICO Book)
In a modeling project (see Figure 2), over a period of a year, data were collected to evaluate the performance and to see if lessons learned can be extracted. This resulted in two major people-oriented findings :
If key people (from the informal part of the organisation) are left out from the workshop discussions, problems will be detected late in the process, usually when the staff complain that they cannot work with the model. Therefore it is a good sign if the input-curve increases in the first phases of the project and decreases towards the end of the project. The sooner you realise the requirements and problems the sooner you will get on the right track. The right selection of people to involve in the modeling is decisive.
In the beginning the consulting and the field test team had a lot of discussions and interviews because it took time to understand the existing procedures and to deal with people ´s wishes and suggestions. So the modeling in the first two months was very slow. However, Once the goals, procedures, and missing practices were well understood and a team spirit was established, the modeling speed doubled (compare versions v02 and v03 in Figure 2). If you are on the right track, there must be a jump in your effort and productivity curve, otherwise you have not reached the “point of no return“ when all staff and the modeling team start to work towards a shared vision.
In the Bestregit field test sites in Spain, Austria and Ireland this point of no return was achieved at a later stage than in the above described German project, due to additional cultural factors influencing the project:
Position Language. It is a fact that directors, managers, and staff speak different languages and may have different viewpoints on the same situation. This has been observed in a field study in the US involving above 70 companies. An interview of business managers (directors) and project managers on the same topics illustrated -
Professional Language. Bestregit was not only a multi-cultural project, it was also an inter-disciplinary one. The participating people had largely differing backgrounds including computer science, history, languages, business, sociology, and law. Thus, when we started with an improvement guideline version 1.0 written in a computer science jargon many of the users failed to understand the document fully.
This situation was solved in two ways:
First a common notation was greed to express models and goals in a simple way. The notation had to be simple enough to be understood by non-computer background people. This formal language was then used in all further meetings by all partners as a basis to discuss their results with the others.
Secondly the guideline had to be refined once again to make more definitions and explain the improvement steps in a non-computer-scientist specific jargon. Thus a success criteria was the use of an inter-disciplinary language that allows common understanding of principles and steps across professions such as computer science, history, languages, business, sociology, and law.
The misunderstandings caused by different professional languages at the beginning of the project can be illustrated by the following facts:
Figure 3: The Johari Window
The same principle can be applied to measure 4 different possible states with regard to knowledge of one’s culture, and the understanding of other cultures in the project team.
Respondents to the OSIRIS survey were asked to rate, on a scale from 1 to 5, the discrepancy between the understanding cultures in the ISIS project have of themselves, and the understanding others have of them. The questions asked were based on the Johari Window. The table below shows the perceived discrepancies between each culture’s understanding of itself and the understanding other cultures have of it. Note that the ratings for each culture are by the other two cultures not by own culture.
Figure 4: Measured Discrepancies in the Perceived Understanding
The bigger the discrepancy the smaller the incidence of perceived shared understanding and, implicitly then, the fewer issues “open for discussion”. It is interesting that Germany was the only culture with an above-average mean score which may imply that other cultures more often than not find their own understanding of German culture to be at odds with that of the Germans’ own and that “blind spots” , which can hinder effective interaction, may be greater than the Germans themselves believe.
Nearly the same situation appeared in the Bestregit project. The project leader and the consulting partner who developed the improvement guideline were native Austrian. In technical science issues, and perhaps also due to the same native language, Austrians are similar in this respect to the Germans.
It happend during the project that some results (e.g. the interactive training course) had to be re-agreed a number of times although the Austrian group felt that clear definitions have been agreed already.
The first 3 layers are visible to an outside observer; their cultural meaning, however is invisible. The 4th layer, values, are acquired so early in our lives that they remain unconscious. Therefore they cannot be discussed, nor can they be directly observed by outsiders.
Geert Hofstede surveyed 116,000 IBM employees across 40 countries and identified four important dimensions of national value systems. Hofstede's four dimensions [13,23] are:
Power Distance: Power Distance Index (PDI) indicates the extent to which a society accepts the fact that power in institutions and organisations is distributed unequally among individuals. In small PDI countries subordinates and superiors consider each other as existentially equal and decentralisation is popular, while large PDI countries subscribe to authority of bosses and centralisation.
Collectivism / Individualism: Individualism indicates the extent to which a society is a loose social framework in which people are supposed to take care only of themselves and their immediate families. Collectivism is a tight social framework in which people distinguish between in-groups and out-groups and expect their in-group to look after them. In individualist countries people are supposed to take care of themselves and remain emotionally independent from the group. The dominant motivation is self-interest. In collective societies the concern is for the group. Individuals define their identity by relationships to others and group belonging.
Femininity / Masculinity: Masculinity indicates the extent to which the dominant values in a society tend toward assertiveness and the acquisition of things. In masculine cultures importance is placed on assertiveness, competitiveness and materialism in the form of earnings and advancement, promotions and big bonuses. Femininity indicates the concern for people and the quality of life. In feminine cultures the concern is for quality of relationships and the work of life, nurturing and social well being.
Uncertainty Avoidance: Uncertainty Avoidance indicates the extent to which a society feels threatened by ambiguous situations and tries to avoid them by providing rules, believing in absolute truths, and refusing to tolerate deviance. In weak uncertainty avoidance countries anxiety levels are relatively low. Aggression and emotions are not supposed to be shown and people seem to be quiet, easy-going, indolent, controlled and lazy while in high uncertainty countries people seems to be busy, fidgety, emotional, aggressive and active.
All the four dimensions are a continuum between two extremes and only very few national cultures, if any, are wholly at one or the other extreme.
According to Calori [33] four clusters emerge from Hofstede's European results.
It is interesting that each of the 3 field test partners belongs to a different cluster (Austria to the Germanic Group; Ireland to the Anglo-Saxon Group, Spain to the Latin group).
A subjective impression from the Bestregit project suggests that in Europe we already exchange cultures to such an extent that people who have been involved in mobility projects recognise and display a mixture of cultural indicators.
e.g. The Irish expert organising the field test in Ireland was native Irish but had lived in Poland a long time. e.g. The Spanish expert organising the field test in Spain was native Spanish but had lived in England for more than one year.
And so forth.
Of course, we learn from other cultures, and especially good and desirable attitudes are likely to be copied.
Individualist or collectivist value systems fundamentally influence the perception and usefulness of group decision systems and teamwork infratstructures. Hofstede [13] refered to a management researcher from the U.S., Christopher Earley who performed an enlightening laboratory experiment on a group of 48 management trainees from southern China and 48 matched management trainees from the U.S. Half of the participants in either country were given group tasks, the other half individual tasks. Also, half of the participants in either country, both from the group task and from the individual task subsets were asked to mark each completed item with their names, the other half turned them in anonymously. “The Chinese collectivist partcipants performed best when operating with a group goal and anonymously. They performed worst when operating individually and with their name marked on the items produced. The American individualist participants performed best when operating individually and with their name marked, and abysmally low when operating as a group and anonymously.”
This means that different continents will have different requirements from the same methodology, and Bestregit would have to be promoted differently in China than in Europe or the US. However, the higher the acceptance of group decisions the more effective a Bestregit approach would become.
These service organisations are usually integrated into existing research, educational, industry, or state-service networks and have a quite hierarchical structure. Decisions must be agreed with a director, presented and agreed on a board (sometimes with representatives from social partners, local industry, the government) and must be planned with the major funding sources. Thus managers in these “innovation transfer organisations” have to play roles that are sometimes at odds with each other –
Mostly the board consists of state officers and senior managers of local industry (with a high uncertainty avoidance), whereas the innovation agents are contracted consultants with high individualism and low uncertainty avoidance.
When Bestregit was presented for the first time, the board representatives (with a high unertainty avoidance) did not see an urgency for change. A typical view of people with high uncertainty avoidance was: Why change the world, if everything has been stabilised so nicely?
The experience in the Bestregit project shows that these people with a high uncertainty avoidance run through a set of self-experience stages:
From a cultural perspective (taking Hofstede results and these additional factors into account) the following impacts became visible in the Bestregit project.
So the impression is that what Hofstede published for IBM might show different results if it is applied for a different industry sector.
It is not enough in Europe to just define processes, assess them, and, if they are not properly executed, to set staffing consequences or exchange people. This is the reason why many European organisations try to establish processes with a team-work culture that allow people to identify themselves with the process and to actively work with others in a highly motivating environment.
A major problem is the fact that different languages are spoken, and it seems hard to find a consistent architecture of goals that links the objectives of the different groups in such a way that success and the achievement of goals becomes traceable. A goal tree then becomes a translator of process improvement understanding across different groups within and outside an organisation.
Bestregit took all these aspects into account and build them into the methodology, through a continuous interaction between the improvement guideline developer and field test partners from different cultural environments.
A way to focus and direct this knowledge is to establish a skill profiling and learning system which helps engineers from the workplace to get their internal advise on a personal learning route, and the system ensures that (although offered on a personal level) a common focus is achieved.
Here we refer to the EU project CREDIT which developed a generic (configurable) environment which can be adapted to different skill sets, learning routes, and offers guidance through an Intranet system.
Figure 5: The CREDIT System Architecture
Quality. totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs. [ISO 8402:1994, adopted in ISO/IEC 9126]
Quality. The degree to which a system, component, process, or service meets customer or user needs or expectations. [IEEE-Software Engineering Standards]
It was also recognised that in the software development process, there are several stakeholders who have naturally different views of quality. Three views are identified in the ISO/IEC 9126:1991 standard. Even though these views are incorporated in a more comprehensive quality model in the currently draft version of the new ISO/IEC 9126 standard, we prefer to present the original definitions below.
"User's view... Users are mainly interested in using the software, its performance and the effects of using the software. Users evaluate the software without knowing the internal aspects of the software, or how the software is developed...."
"Developer’s view. The process of development requires the user and the developer to use the same software quality characteristics, since they apply to requirements and acceptance. When developing off-the-shelf software, the implied needs must be reflected in the quality requirement...."
"Manager's view. A manager may be more interested in the overall quality rather than in a specific quality characteristic, and for this reason will need to assign weights, reflecting business requirements, to the individual characteristics. The manager may also need to balance the quality improvement with management criteria such as schedule delay or cost overrun, because he wishes to optimise quality within limited cost, human resources and time-frame."
[Excerpts from the text of the ISO/IEC 9126:1991 standard on Information technology - Software product review - Quality characteristics and guidelines for their use.]
Our objective in this paper is to elaborate on the last one of the above views.
A business manager sees process improvement or the achievement of quality under a different perspective. He wants to generate business, secure markets, increase shares, and get new contracts. Thus his interest is to create economic feedback loops that allow an increase of business potentials by investment into process improvement.
Figure 1 : A Process – Business Feedback Loop
As it is illustrated in Figure 1 investment is possible on single process factors or a combination of them, and the change in the actual design/production/delivery process will impact a set of business factors. The business manager’s greatest challenge is to find a traceable feedback relationship between process factors and business performance factors with built-in pay back.
Another important aspect is that the market (in a business environment) sometimes does not decide by actually measured quality, it is the perceived quality that counts.
Business Manager’s Quality Perception. A business manager invests in processes, people, and infrastructure with the aim to satisfy market demands and perceived quality, with a view of creating a traceable process – business feedback loop.
The presentation of these various models and theories of culture and its influence is a way of empathising the ubiquitous and often powerful force of cultural-determined differences. Culturally-determined differences can, of course, be both a help and a hindrance in any kind of cross-cultural collaboration and efforts at modelling across cultures. If the relative strengths of each culture can be appreciated then they can be drawn from and used to strengthen cross-cultural collaborations. As a result, however, of what Susan Schneider has called the "convergence myths" of international business, that the world is getting smaller anyway (theories of a global information society belong to this myth) and that business is business no matter where you are, the cross-cultural businessperson may choose to believe that cultural differences are either non-existent or of no importance. Such a belief can be the ruination of many efforts at co-operation across cultures.
It is not that culture is the most important factor in such undertakings merely that because it is so commonly overlooked it may well be one of the most common reasons for the failure of such undertakings to enjoy full success. In this relatively short presentation we hope we have touched upon some of the issues involved in the often unrecognised influence of culture upon the field of process analysis and specifically upon the perception of quality in this field. Cultural factors such as those we have grouped under the headings of Language; Culturally-determined discrepancies in perceived understanding; Cultural profiles based on Hofstede's studies and other cross-cultural studies; National identities and national systems of education and the organisation of work and business cannot be ignored. An understanding of how these factors may influence a process improvement experiment, an organisation's goal or an individual's perception of quality is an important a weapon in the arsenal of those attempting to facilitate process improvement as the knowledge of the many various traditional models and methodologies for achieving this aim. Indeed it may be time to modify many of these models to take into account the influence of cultural factors.
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