Quality Circles in the Department of Defense: Some Preliminary Findings,
Abstract
Quality Circles management has been greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by American managers attempting to emulate the recent economic success of the Japanese industrial complex. The Department of Defense is becoming actively involved in Quality Circles. Scant rigorous research exists on the effectiveness of Quality Circles as a management tool. A nonequivalent control group design compared 14 Quality Circles groups to 37 untrained work groups on a number of attitudinal measures. No consistent differences between groups were detected. Design flaws limiting the validity of the findings included sample-size problems, experimental mortality, weak treatment effects, and poor experimental control. The study's results should be treated as highly tentative and further research should attempt to overcome these design limitations. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 25, 1983
- Accession Number
- ADP000813
Entities
People
- Nestor K. Ovalle Ii
- Robert P. Steel
- Russell F. Lloyd
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology