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IMDS 107,5
688
Self-assessment of conflict management in client-supplier collaborative new product development Ping-Kit Lam and Kwai-Sang Chin Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China
Jian-Bo Yang Manchester School of Management, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, and
Weitao Liang Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China Abstract Purpose – This research paper aims to present the critical managerial issues and a self-assessment system of conflict management in client-supplier collaborative new product development (NPD) environment. Design/methodology/approach – Critical managerial issues and success factors for conflict management in client-supplier collaborative NPD were first identified. A self-assessment process and associated methodologies were then established. With the development of a prototype self-assessment system, the proposed self-assessment methodologies and process were validated in industry. Findings – A total of 13 critical factors for conflict management in client-supplier collaborative NPD environment were identified. Based on the hierarchy model of the factors, a self-assessment system and process, called PAIR, was established. The proposed self-assessment system and process was developed and validated with six companies with positive results. Originality/value – Conflict is an inevitable phenomenon in client-supplier collaborative NPD, which affects NPD performance in terms of product quality, meeting of target delivery schedule and development cost. The developed system and process enables clients and suppliers to assess their conflict management practices and identify improvement areas. It provides a platform for the collaborating parties to continually improve their conflict management and in turn NPD performance. Keywords Self assessment; Conflict management; Buyer-seller relationships; New products Paper type Research paper
Industrial Management & Data Systems Vol. 107 No. 5, 2007 pp. 688-714 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0263-5577 DOI 10.1108/02635570710750435
1. Introduction New product development (NPD) is widely recognized as a key to corporate prosperity (Cooper, 1998; Craig and Hart, 1992; Primo and Admundson, 2002). In recent years, client-supplier collaboration has been an imperative strategy of NPD. In response to today’s rigorous competition, rapid technological change and shortened product life cycle, a growing number of manufacturing firms adopt a strategy that focuses on their core competencies and outsources the non-core activities to their suppliers (Humphreys et al., 2005; Krause et al., 1998). Reductions of development time and costs,
and an improvement of product quality are the common benefits of client-supplier collaboration (Ragatz et al., 2002). NPD is highly complex. It requires the involvement of skills and expertise from different areas (Littler et al., 1995). Xie et al. (1998) stated that success of NPD relies on the integrated cross-functional input and effective coordination and cooperation among different functional areas, and the interdependence and differences among working parties could lead to conflict in NPD. Several researchers have studied conflict in NPD at an intra-organizational level, and the importance of conflict and its management to NPD success has been acknowledged (Dyer and Song, 1998; Gobeli et al., 1998; Pelled and Adler, 1994; Xie et al., 1998). Lam and Chin (2003) extended conflict research in NPD from an intra-organizational to an inter-organizational level. It was found that conflict is also an inevitable phenomenon in client-supplier collaborative NPD affecting NPD performance in terms of product quality, meeting of target delivery schedule and development cost. In collaborative NPD, clients and suppliers are dependent on each other for NPD success. They, however, may differ in various aspects such as culture, technical belief, role and objectives. The interdependence and differences between clients and suppliers inevitably lead to conflict throughout the NPD process. Conflict management in collaborative NPD is a new issue that has received little attention from both academic researchers and industrial practitioners. Most clients and suppliers lack effective practices to manage conflict in collaborative NPD. One of the major obstacles for the establishment of effective conflict management is that clients and suppliers do not know how well they are performing and what they can do to improve the conflict management. There is an obvious need for a self-assessment on the conflict management aspect to support both the clients and suppliers to well-manage the conflicts in the NPD process. The authors therefore tried to address this obstacle by proposing a self-assessment system of conflict management after identifying the critical success factors of the client-supplier conflict management in their previous publication (Lam and Chin, 2005). With the use of the system, clients and suppliers can assess their conflict management performance and identify areas for improvement in the conflict management and in turn NPD performance. This paper presents the outcome of the authors’ research output in this aspect. 2. Self-assessment: a tool for continual business improvement Self-assessment is recognizable as an imperative tool for the continual improvement of business performance. Hillman (1994) stated that self-assessment aims at identifying and acting on the areas which require improvement efforts, while recognizing and maintaining the practices which are doing well. European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM, 1994) defines self-assessment as: . . . a comprehensive, systematic and regular review of an organization’s activities and results referenced against a model of business excellence. The self-assessment process allows the organization to discern clearly its strengths and areas in which improvements can be made and culminates in planned improvement actions which are monitored for progress.
The popularity of self-assessment has been uplifted by the prevailing use of quality standards and awards such as the ISO9000, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), the European Quality Award (EQA) and the Deming Prize, etc.
Self-assessment of conflict management 689
IMDS 107,5
690
(Piskar and Dolinsek, 2006; Zink and Schmidt, 1998). Numerous researchers have studied the use of self-assessment to measure business performance against the awards models and have argued it as a useful performance improvement tool (Ojanen et al., 2002; Caffyn, 1999; Ritchie and Dale, 2000; Samuelsson and Nilsson, 2002; Wu et al., 1997). However, the use of self-assessment in conflict management is unnoticeable. The self-assessment system presented in this paper is developed based on the conceptual structure of the MBNQA, but, of course, with the unique set of assessment criteria and scoring method specially developed for client-supplier conflict management. The developed assessment system has contribution in two folds. Firstly, it can surely facilitate the self-assessment and continual improvement of conflict management in client-supplier collaborative NPD based on the hierarchy model of conflict management. Secondly, it serves as a basis for a benchmarking platform, such as an industrial consortium, for client-supplier conflict management. Each company of the benchmarking organization could identify their own weakness and strength by comparing their assessment scores with the industrial average and leaders, and then develop action agenda for improvement. Hillman (1994) suggests that self-assessment has three main elements. The first element is “model” which acts as a framework for evaluating business performance. “Measurement” is the second element which measures organizations’ performance against the model. The last element is “Management” which is concerned with managing the self-assessment process to ensure its effectiveness. The three elements of the proposed system are outlined in the following sections. 3. Self-assessment model of conflict management In general, the first step to develop the self-assessment model is to identify and prioritize the critical issues and factors for the addressed assessment problem (Gottschalk and Solli-Saether, 2005; Choy et al., 2006, Law et al., 2006; Wee and Quazi, 2005; Wong, 2005). A self-assessment model usually comprises two sets of assessment criteria: enablers and results. Enablers are what an organization does in order to achieve performance excellence, while results are what an organization has achieved. Lam and Chin (2005) developed a hierarchy model of conflict management in collaborative NPD. As shown in Figure 1, the model comprises 13 critical success factors of conflict management, which are grouped into four categories. Based on the model, the enabler criteria, namely relationship management, conflict handling system, NPD process management, and communication, and their respective sub-criteria of the self-assessment model are developed. Using analytic hierarchy process (AHP), the enabler criteria and sub-criteria are assigned with weights, through industrial expert interviews, to indicate their relative importance (Lam and Chin, 2005). The result criterion consists of two sub-criteria which measure NPD performance and conflict handling results, respectively. MBNQA model and EFQM model, two worldwide adopted quality assessment models, set the ratio of the enablers to results to be 0.55:0.45 (1.22:1) and 0.5:0.5 (1:1), respectively. In setting the ratio of the enablers and results of the self-assessment model of conflict management, we interviewed three self-assessment consultants who had, on an average, six years experience in helping companies conduct self-assessment on the basis of quality management models. It was advised that the ratio should be
Level 1: Goal
Level 2: Categories of factors
Level 3: Factors
Self-assessment of conflict management
Conflict Management in Client-Supplier Collaborative NPD
691 Relationship Management
Conflict Handling System
NPD Process Management
Communication
Mutual understanding of organizational objectives
Conflict management culture
Mutual understanding of NPD Process
Communication
Commitment to the collaboration
Conflict handling process
NPD task allocation
Information system
Conflict handling skills
Product specification management
Conflict monitoring & improvement
NPD progress monitoring
Trust
Figure 1. Hierarchy model of conflict management for client-supplier collaborative NPD
about 1:1 so as to reflect both the effectiveness of the practices and organizational performance. However, they recognized that the majority of companies have no measurements on conflict management performance. Hence, they suggested that the ratio of enablers and results should initially be set to 1:0 and gradually changed to about 1:1 when all the measurement data are available. Based on MBNQA, which is worldwide recognized, our assessment model sets the ratio to 0.55:0.45. The weights of the criteria and sub-criteria of the assessment model are tabulated in Table I. Criteria for performance excellence in conflict management
Points
1. Relationship management 1.1 Mutual understanding of organizational objectives 1.2 Commitment to the collaboration 1.3 Trust 2. Conflict handling system 2.1 Conflict management culture 2.2 Conflict handling process 2.3 Conflict handling skills 2.4 Conflict monitoring and improvement 3. NPD process management 3.1 Mutual understanding of NPD process 3.2 NPD task allocation 3.3 Product specification management 3.4 NPD progress monitoring 4. Communication 4.1 Communication management 4.2 Information system 5. Results 5.1 NPD performance 5.2 Conflict handling results Total points
171 36 63 72 117 35 23 37 22 142 34 40 36 32 120 75 45 450 225 225 1,000
Table I. Self-assessment model of conflict management
IMDS 107,5
692
Recognizing that conflict management results are not available to most organizations because conflict management is a new issue and considering the applicability of the self-assessment, the results section is currently not included in our case studies which apply the self-assessment system to collaborative NPD. In the case studies, the enablers account for 100 percent of the assessment score and the results are assigned with 0 percent. For each sub-criterion in the enabler section, measurement items are developed to assess how well organizations are performing in terms of approach and deployment. Approach measures the degree of excellence of the approach used to address the issue. Deployment measures the extent to which the approach has been implemented to the relevant areas and activities of the organization. For the results section, measurement items measure how favorable the results are. To facilitate the assessment, the guidelines for scoring are established and shown in Table II. The measurement items are developed mainly based on the literature regarding the good practices to achieve the sub-criteria, which were subsequently refined based on review of five manufacturing experts (three suppliers, two clients) who engaged in NPD projects in collaboration with their partners and they had the average experience of 19.6 years. All the experts were in the upper management level and they are assumed to be knowledgeable about the overall operation of the collaboration. The measurement items, which are non-prescriptive and generic in nature, could be applicable to most situations of collaborative NPD. Figure 2 shows the hierarchical view of the self assessment model, which consists of five levels: (for an illustrative purpose, only the structure of Section 2.3 conflict handling skills is expanded): (1) Conflict management. (2) Criteria (e.g. 2. Conflict handling system). (3) Sub-criteria (e.g. 2.1. Conflict handling skills). (4) Measurement items (e.g. 2.3.1. Does your company determine . . .) (5) Approach/deployment/results (e.g. 2.3.1. Approach/deployment). By aggregating the assessment scores of lower levels, the performance of conflict management can eventually been assessed in a systematical way. Using the overall assessment score, organizations can identify their conflict management adoption status based on the score range depicted in Table III. 4. Scoring method In spite of the wide adoption of self-assessments (Brown, 1997; Gadd, 1995; Lee and Quazi, 2001; Wu et al., 1997), measurement inaccuracy has been the problem impairing the validity of assessments (Lascelles and Peacock, 1996; Porter and Tanner, 1996; Siow et al., 2001; Yang et al., 2001; Zink and Schmidt, 1998). The inaccuracy can be attributed mainly to two deficiencies of the conventional scoring approaches. First, assessors are forced to make complete assessments even though they are not fully confident about the situation. Second, the approaches require assessors to give a single average score on a measurement item, which weakens assessment accuracy and is unfavorable to the identification of strengths and areas for improvement. Several researchers, including Law et al. (2006), Liu and Hai (2005), Wei et al. (2005), Leung and Chin (2004), Chin et al. (2002) and Tummala et al. (1997) proposed the use of
0 0.25
0.5
0.75
1
Beginners H3
Improvers H4
Achievers H5
The approach is prevention-based and systematic The approach is subject to occasional review and improvement The approach is sound, prevention-based and systematic The approach is subject to regular review and improvement The approach is exceptionally well-defined, sound, prevent-based and systematic The approach is subject to regular review and improvement
No approach at all The approach is unsystematic and inconsistent
Utility Approach
Unaware H1 Uncommitted H2
Evaluation Grade
No results or poor results Few results show positive trends. Some favorable comparisons with own targets Some results show positive trends Favorable comparisons with the targets
Results
Most results show strongly positive Applied to about 3/4 of the potential when considering all relevant areas and trends Favorable comparisons with own activities targets and external organizations Applied to full potential in all relevant All results show strongly positive areas and activities trends Excellent comparisons with own targets and external organizations
No deployment at all Applied to about 1/4 of the potential when considering all relevant areas and activities Applied to about 1/2 of the potential when considering all relevant areas and activities
Deployment
Self-assessment of conflict management 693
Table II. Scoring guidelines
IMDS 107,5
694
AHP to aid companies to solve multi-criteria assessment problems in diverse areas. AHP is a decision-making technique developed by Saaty (1980) to tackle the complex problems of choice and prioritization. The use of AHP is relatively simple that assessors firstly identify a set of evaluation criteria and sub-criteria that suit their companies’ situations and organize them into a hierarchical structure. Then, assessors conduct pairwise evaluations of the criteria at each level of the hierarchy. Finally, the importance weights (scores) of the evaluation criteria and sub-criteria can be computed and the overall scores of assessment can be obtained. However, the AHP approach has the limited capability in dealing with the issue of the two deficiencies of the conventional scoring approaches mentioned above, incomplete data and imprecise judgment. This suggests that a better scoring method is needed for improving the quality of assessment. The authors respond to this need by proposing an evidential reasoning (ER) based method to address the problem of uncertainty in conflict management assessment. This research adopts the ER scoring approach which was developed by Yang et al. (2001) to improve the accuracy of assessments. The ER approach has sound theoretical Conflict management 1. Relationship management 2. Conflict handling system 2.1. Conflict management culture 2.2. Conflict handling process 2.3. Conflict handling skills 2.3.1. Does your company determine employees' skills required for implementing conflict management? 2.3.1. Approach 2.3.1. Deployment 2.3.2. Does your company identify employees for training and education? 2.3.3. Does your company provide proper training and education to improve employees' conflict handling skills? 2.4. Conflict monitoring and improvement 3. NPD process management 4. Communication
Figure 2. Hierarchical view of the self-assessment
Level
Adoption status
1
Unaware organizations are those who have not yet realized the importance of conflict management to the success of collaborative NPD. They are unaware of the essence and contents of conflict management. Uncommitted organizations are those with preliminary understanding of conflict management. However, they are moving in a wrong direction or not willing to commit substantial efforts and resources to implement conflict management. Beginners are those organizations who are committed to implement conflict management but still in an early stage of the implementation. They are finding effective ways to improve their conflict management. Improvers are performing in a right direction and have made substantial progress in conflict management implementation. They can manage conflict quite effectively and efficiently. Achievers have developed a mature system addressing comprehensively the essential elements of conflict management. They are able to manage conflict well and enhance the collaborative relationship.
2
3 4 Table III. Conflict management adoption status
5
Score
0-125
126-375 376-625 626-875 876-1,000
basis (Yang, 2001; Yang et al., 2006; Yang and Xu, 2002), which enables better assessment accuracy than the traditional scoring approaches (Li and Yang, 2003; Yang et al., 2001). The assessment problem will be modeled by a belief decision matrix and the attributes are aggregated by the ER algorithm (Wang et al., 2006; Yang et al., 2006). Both the belief decision matrix and the ER algorithm are the two main elements of the ER approach, which is briefly described below. Basically, the ER approach employs a belief structure to represent an assessment. Using the five evaluation grades depicted in Table II, the assessment of sub-criterion A1, S(A1), is represented as the following structure: SðA1 Þ ¼ {ðH 1 ; b1;1 Þ; ðH 2 ; b2;1 Þ; ðH 3 ; b3;1 Þ; ðH 4 ; b4;1 Þ; ðH 5 ; b5;1 Þ} where Hn is an evaluation grade as defined in Table II, bn,1 denotes the degree of belief that A1 is assessed to an evaluation grade Hn, which satisfies 1 $ bn;1 $ 0 and P P5 bn;1 # 1. An assessment is complete when 5n¼1 bn;1 ¼ 1, and incomplete when Pn¼1 5 n¼1 bn;1 , 1. Incomplete assessment is common as assessments are subjective and the evidence for assessments could be incomplete, vague and uncertain. Unlike the conventional scoring approaches, using the belief structure, assessors are not forced to make a complete judgment when they are not 100 percent sure about the subjective judgments or when evidence is not complete. Moreover, the belief structure enables the representation of an assessment as a distribution instead of a singe average score. In this way, assessors can make judgments more accurately. It also facilitates the identification of strengths and improvement areas which is the main purpose of the self-assessment. It should be noted that the evaluation grades can be quantified using utility as follows: uðH 1 Þ ¼ uðunawareÞ ¼ 0 uðH 2 Þ ¼ uðuncommittedÞ ¼ 0:25 uðH 3 Þ ¼ uðbeginnersÞ ¼ 0:5 uðH 4 Þ ¼ uðimproversÞ ¼ 0:75 uðH 5 Þ ¼ uðachieversÞ ¼ 1 The conflict management self-assessment model is in a form of hierarchy constituting criteria, sub-criteria, etc. The overall assessment results can be obtained by combining the assessments of the low-hierarchies. Based on the evaluation analysis model and the evidence combination rule of the Dempster-Shafer theory, the ER approach is able to synthesize both complete and incomplete assessments by aggregating the degrees of belief of lower level criteria based on their weightings (Yang, 2001). Take a complete assessment as an example, suppose there are L sub-criteria in the group, and the relative weight of the criteria PL Ai is denoted by vi. The weights can be normalized so that 1 $ vi $ 0 and k¼1 vi ¼ 1. The assessment of sub-criterion A2, S(A2), is represented as:
Self-assessment of conflict management 695
IMDS 107,5
SðA2 Þ ¼ {ðH 1 ; b1;2 Þ; ðH 2 ; b2;2 Þ; ðH 3 ; b3;2 Þ; ðH 4 ; b4;2 Þ; ðH 5 ; b5;2 Þ} Let: mn;1 ¼ v1 bn;1 ðn ¼ 1; . . . ; 5Þ
696
and
~ H ;1 ¼ v1 1 2 m
5 X
!
bn;1
n¼1
H ;1 ¼ 1 2 v1 ; m mn;2 ¼ v2 bn;2
,
H ;1 þ m H ;1 mH ;1 ¼ m ðn ¼ 1; . . . ; 5Þ and
~ H ;2 ¼ v2 1 2 m
5 X
!
bn;2 ;
n¼1
H ;2 ¼ 1 2 v2 ; m
,
H ;2 þ m H ;2 mH ;2 ¼ m
where mn,1 and mn,2 are the basic probability masses, and mH,1 and mH,2 are the unassigned probability masses. The probability masses can be aggregated to obtain the combined probability masses using the following equations: mn ¼ k½mn;1 mn;2 þ mH ;2 mn;1 þ mn;2 mH ;1 ;
ðn ¼ 1; . . . ; 5Þ
~ n ¼ k½m ~ H ;1 m ~ H ;2 m ~ H ;2 þ m ~ H ;1 þ m H ;2 m H ;1 m H ¼ k½m H ;1 m H ;2 m 2
321
5 5 X X 6 7 k¼6 1 2 mt;1 mn;2 7 4 5 t¼1 n ¼ 1 n–t
Assessments of other sub-criteria can be aggregated in the same way until all the L sub-criteria are processed. If L ¼ 2, the combined degree of belief would be as follows:
bn ¼
mn ; H 12m
ðn ¼ 1; . . . ; 5Þ;
bH ¼
~n m H 12m
The ER approach combines assessments by aggregating degrees of belief rather than average scores. Thus, the diversity of the lower hierarchies can be preserved in the upper hierarchies. The preservation of the distributed assessments is of paramount importance to the self-assessment as it links the assessment with the identification of strengths and areas for improvement. By looking at the distributed assessment of overall results, its criteria and sub-criteria, organizations can readily be given more precise information about their performance on conflict management, which in turn helps establish corresponding action plans for continual improvement. Moreover, the ER approach generates overall assessment results by using utility intervals which are able to address the problem of incomplete assessment (Yang and Xu, 2002). After aggregating all the assessments of all criteria, the maximum, minimum and average utilities of the performance of conflict management can be calculated:
umax ðconflict managementÞ ¼
N 21 X
bn uðH n Þ þ ðbN þ bH ÞuðH N Þ
n¼1
umin ðconflict managementÞ ¼ ðb1 þ bH ÞuðH 1 Þ þ
N X
bn uðH n Þ
n¼2
uavg ðconflict managementÞ ¼
umax ðconflict managementÞ þ umin ðconflict managementÞ 2
From the above equations, the best possible result (umax) is obtained by allocating the unassigned degree of belief to the grade of “achievers” whereas the worse possible result (umin) is obtained by assigning all the missing degree of belief to the grade of “unaware.” The maximum and minimum utilities provide those organizations with incomplete assessments a picture about the possible range of performance. Based on the overall utilities, organizations can identify their conflict management adoption status portrayed in Table III. The distributed assessments on the three sub-attributes, A1 (item 3.4.1), A2 (item 3.4.2) and A3 (item 3.4.3), used for assessing the attribute “3.4 (A) NPD progress monitoring of company Cs” are used to illustrate the ER approach introduced above. We have: SðA1 Þ ¼ {ðH 1 ; 0Þ; ðH 2 ; 0Þ; ðH 3 ; 0:25Þ; ðH 4 ; 0:25Þ; ðH 5 ; 0Þ; ðH ; 0:5Þ} SðA2 Þ ¼ {ðH 1 ; 0Þ; ðH 2 ; 0Þ; ðH 3 ; 0Þ; ðH 4 ; 0:4179Þ; ðH 5 ; 0:4179Þ; ðH ; 0:1642Þ} SðA3 Þ ¼ {ðH 1 ; 0Þ; ðH 2 ; 0Þ; ðH 3 ; 0Þ; ðH 4 ; 0Þ; ðH 5 ; 0:93Þ; ðH ; 0:07Þ} The three sub-attributes are equally important, or v1 ¼ v2 ¼ v3 ¼ 1=3. We therefore have the following basic probability masses for A1: m1;1 ¼ v1 b1;1 ¼ 0=3 ¼ 0;
m2;1 ¼ 0=3 ¼ 0;
m4;1 ¼ 0:25=3 ¼ 0:0833; ~ H ;1 ¼ 0:5=3 ¼ 0:1667; m
m3;1 ¼ 0:25=3 ¼ 0:0833
m5;1 ¼ 0=3 ¼ 0
H ;1 ¼ 1 2 1=3 ¼ 0:6667 m
Similarly, for A2 we have: m1;2 ¼ 0=3 ¼ 0; m2;2 ¼ 0=3 ¼ 0; m3;2 ¼ 0=3 ¼ 0; m4;2 ¼ 0:4179=3 ¼ 0:1393; ~ H ;2 ¼ 0:1642=3 ¼ 0:0547; m H ;2 ¼ 1 2 1=3 ¼ 0:6667 m5;2 ¼ 0:4179=3 ¼ 0:1393; m For A3 we have: m1;3 ¼ 0=3 ¼ 0; m5;3
Self-assessment of conflict management
m2;3 ¼ 0=3 ¼ 0; m3;3 ¼ 0=3 ¼ 0 m4;3 ¼ 0=3 ¼ 0; ~ H ;3 ¼ 0:07=3 ¼ 0:0233; m H ;3 ¼ 1 2 1=3 ¼ 0:6667 ¼ 0:93=3 ¼ 0:31; m
Let’s aggregate S(A1) and S(A2) first as follows: 21 k12 ¼ 1 2 ðm3;1 m4;2 þ m3;1 m5;2 þ m4;1 m5;2 Þ ¼ ½1 2 ð0:0833 £ 0:1393 þ 0:0833 £ 0:1393 þ 0:0833 £ 0:139321 ¼ 1:036
697
IMDS 107,5
698
m1;12 ¼ k12 ½m1;1 m1;2 þ mH ;2 m1;1 þ m1;2 mH ;1 ¼ 1:036 £ ð0 £ 0 þ 0:7214 £ 0 þ 0 £ 0:8334Þ ¼ 0 Similarly: m2;12 ¼ 0; m3;12 ¼ 0:06226; m4;12 ¼ 0:194562; ~ H ;1 þ m ~ H ;1 ~ H ;12 ¼ k12 ½m ~ H ;2 m ~ H ;2 m H ;2 m H ;1 þ m m
m5;12 ¼ 0:12028
¼ 1:036 £ ð0:1667 £ 0:0547 þ 0:1667 £ 0:6667 þ 0:6667 £ 0:0547Þ ¼ 0:162378 H ;2 m H ;12 ¼ k12 ½m H ;1 ¼ 1:036 £ ð0:6667 £ 0:6667Þ ¼ 0:46052; m mH ;12 ¼ 0:622899 Now, we can combine the aggregated S(A1) and S(A2) with S(A3) as follows: 21 k123 ¼ 1 2 ðm5;3 m3;12 þ m5;3 m4;12 ¼ ½1 2 ð0:31 £ 0:062 þ 0:31 £ 0:194621 ¼ 1:0865 m1;123 ¼ k123 ½m1;3 m1;12 þ mH ;12 m1;3 þ m1;12 mH ;3 ¼ 1:036 £ ð0 £ 0 þ 0:622899 £ 0 þ 0 £ 0:69Þ ¼0 Similarly: m2;123 ¼ 0;
m3;123 ¼ 0:046675;
m4;123 ¼ 0:14586;
m5;123 ¼ 0:340486
~ H ;3 þ m ~ H ;3 þ m ~ H ;123 ¼ k123 ½m ~ H ;12 m ~ H ;12 m H ;12 m H ;3 m ¼ 1:036 £ ð0:0233 £ 0:162378 þ 0:622899 £ 0:0233 þ 0:162378 £ 0:69Þ ¼ 0:466978 H ;123 ¼ k123 ½m H ;12 m H ;3 ¼ 1:036 £ ð0:6667 £ 0:46052Þ ¼ 0:333587 m The overall assessment for the higher level attribute A is represented by: SðAÞ ¼ {ðH 1 ; b1 Þ; ðH 2 ; b2 Þ; ðH 3 ; b3 Þ; ðH 4 ; b4 Þ; ðH 5 ; b5 Þ; ðH ; bH Þ}
bn is calculated as follows: b1 ¼
m1;123 0 ¼ 0; ¼ H ;123 1 2 0:333587 12m
Similarly:
b2 ¼ 0;
b3 ¼ 0:07004;
bH ¼ so:
b4 ¼ 0:218874;
b5 ¼ 0:510923;
~ H ;123 0:133391 m ¼ 0:200163; ¼ H ;123 1 2 0:333587 12m
umax ðAÞ ¼
4 X
bn uðH n Þ þ ðb5 þ b5 ÞuðH 5 Þ
n¼1
¼ ð0 £ 0 þ 0 £ 0:25 þ 0:07004 £ 0:5 þ 0:218874 £ 0:75Þ þ ð0:510923 þ 0:200163Þ £ 1
699
¼ 0:910262 umin ðAÞ ¼ ðb1 þ b1 ÞuðH 1 Þ þ
5 X
bn uðH n Þ
n¼2
¼ ð0 þ 0:200163Þ £ 0 þ ð0 £ 0:25 þ 0:07004 £ 0:5 þ 0:218874 £ 0:75 þ 0:510923 £ 1Þ ¼ 0:710099
uavg ðAÞ ¼
Self-assessment of conflict management
umax ðAÞ þ umin ðAÞ ¼ 0:81018 2
As one can see, the above calculation is complicated even for aggregating three attributes. Fortunately, the IDS software (Yang and Xu, 1999) has been developed and can be used to facilitate the aggregation process using its windows-based graphical interfaces. 5. Self-assessment management process Conventional self-assessment processes aim for assessing the performance of a single party. Thus, they are not suitable for the conflict management self-assessment which assesses the performance of two collaborating parties. We propose a PAIR process for managing the self-assessment. It can be shown in Figure 3 that the process includes four phases: preparation (P), assessment (A), improvement (I) and review (R). Preparation phase ensures clients and suppliers are committed to and ready for the self-assessment. When both parties are well-prepared, they can conduct the assessment in the assessment phase. The third phase is improvement in which clients and suppliers develop and implement improvement action plans based on the assessment results. The assessment process ends with the review phase where the improvement efforts are reviewed. The four phases are further expended into 14 steps described as follows: (1) Define scope. An initiator, who can be a client or supplier, starts the process by defining the scope of the self-assessment. The initiator can select one collaboration as a “pilot” scheme at the beginning, and then progressively involve all collaboration in the self-assessment after the success of the pilot scheme. (2) Gain commitment. Top management’s commitment is of paramount importance to the success of self-assessment. Activities, such as introductory presentations and workshops, can be performed to gain top management’s acknowledgement of the benefits of the self-assessment, which guarantees the provision of sufficient resources and time for the implementation. Conflict is a matter created by collaborating parties. Organizations, who are committed to the
IMDS 107,5
Initiator
Partner
Define scope Gain commitment
700
Gain commitment
Preparation (P) Phase
Assessment (A) Phase
Form an assessment team
Form an assessment team
Understand the model
Understand the model
Collect evidence
Collect evidence
Conduct the assessment
Conduct the assessment
Identify strengths and areas for improvement
Identify strengths and areas for improvement
Produce an assessment report
Produce an assessment report
Compare the assessment results Produce a co-assessment report
Prioritize areas for improvement
Improvement (I) Phase
Figure 3. PAIR self-assessment management process
Review (R) Phase
Prioritize areas for improvement
Develop action plans
Develop co-action plans
Develop action plans
Implement the action plans
Implement the co-action plans
Implement the action plans
Review progress
self-assessment, should then pursue their partner’s commitment to engage in the self-assessment. (3) Form an assessment team. The next step is to form an assessment team constituting members with knowledge of the organization’s operations covering all the criteria in the model of conflict management. A team leader should also be assigned to arrange and coordinate the assessment activities with the partner, and communicate with the top management about the assessment progress and results.
(4) Understand the model. The team needs to understand the assessment model before the assessment. They should discuss with the partner about the model to ensure the same interpretation. (5) Collect evidence. The assessment teams collect evidence regarding the practices that they are performing to achieve the assessment criteria. The collection of evidence should be treated seriously as the accuracy of the assessment is positively proportional to the amount and accuracy of the evidence collected. (6) Conduct the assessment. By examining the evidence collected, the assessment team scores the measurement items. (7) Identify strengths and areas for improvement. Based on the assessment results, strengths and areas for improvement are identified. (8) Produce an assessment report. An assessment report is produced to summarize the assessment results. (9) Compare the assessment results with the partner. The collaborating partners compare their assessment results and examine their practices especially on those criteria which are dependent on the joint-effort of the both parties. (10) Produce a co-assessment report. The assessment teams produce a co-assessment report to present the overall conflict management performance of the collaboration. (11) Prioritize the areas for improvement. Taking such factors as the current performance, degree of importance, ease of improvement, resource constrains and preferences of the partner into consideration, the teams prioritize the areas for improvement. (12) Establish action and co-action plans. Based on the prioritization of the improvement areas, action plans can be established. The teams need to work together to establish co-action plans which are to be jointly implemented by both parties. (13) Implement the action and co-actions plans. The collaborating parties implement the action and co-action plans established to realize the performance improvement. (14) Review progress. The assessment teams review the progress of action plans implementation. The review results would be a major consideration by top management in deciding whether to continue or extend the scope of the self-assessment. We believe that the PAIR process could systematically help clients and suppliers to conduct self-assessment in an effective way. The process was subject to reviews by the three self-assessment consultants, and they all considered the PAIR process could manage the assessment in an effective way. As shown in Figure 4, the assessment process can also be regarded as a wheel for the continual improvement of conflict management. The self-assessment provides a systematic approach to review the practices of conflict management, and the outputs of the assessment are impetus to drive the continual improvement process of conflict management. 6. Applications of the self-assessment system The self-assessment system of conflict management is computerized using the intelligent decision system (IDS) software developed on the basis of the ER approach
Self-assessment of conflict management 701
IMDS 107,5 Preparation (P)
Review (R)
702
Continual Improvement of Conflict Management Assessment (A)
Figure 4. PAIR continual improvement wheel
Improvement (I)
(Yang and Xu, 1999). Figure 5 shows the interface of the self-assessment system. By clicking any attribute of the assessment elements, a data input window will pop up where assessment scores are stored, as shown in Figure 6. For each score, evidence, i.e. supporting reasons, should be provided as a qualitative evaluation to support the score, Figure 7. This feature can facilitate the post-assessment analysis and review. After assessing all the attributes in the hierarchy, the system can aggregate the data and generate findings and reports in a speedy way.
Figure 5. Interface of the self-assessment system
Self-assessment of conflict management 703
Figure 6. Scoring window of the self-assessment system
Figure 7. “Evidence” window of the self-assessment system
IMDS 107,5
704
The assessment system has been applied to three collaborative NPD, involving three clients and three suppliers. Because of the research time constrain, the applications focus on the preparation and assessment phases of the PAIR process. The details of the three collaboration case studies are tabulated in Table IV. Face-to-face interviews were conducted to collect the answers from the companies. One person for each company was interviewed. The interviewees were all managers responsible for NPD projects with their clients/suppliers. The profiles of the interviewees were presented in Table V. In the interviews, the assessment model and the software were firstly introduced to the interviewees. Then the interviewees took about 10 minutes to get familiar with the IDS software. When the interviewees were confident to run the software, they conducted the self-assessment with the software. 6.1 Overall, assessment results Figures 8-10 show the assessment results of the three case studies of client-supplier collaboration generated from the developed self-assessment system. In each of the three figures, there are five clusters of bars. The first one indicates the overall results of conflict management, and the other four clusters represent the scores of the four criteria of the self-assessment. The results show that the overall scores range from 35 to 74 percent (maximum score is 100 percent). Based on the conflict management adoption status tabulated in Table III, companies Ac, Bc, and Bs belong to “Uncommitted” whilst As, Cc, and Cs are considered to be “Beginners.” It can be noted that most of the companies have satisfactory scores on the criteria of relationship management, NPD process management, and communication. However, their scores on conflict handling system only range from 0 to 15 percent, which implies they do not have an effective system to handle conflict. 6.2 Distributed assessment and assessment aggregation The belief structure of the ER approach enables distributed assessments which are combined by aggregating degrees of belief. Table VI shows the assessment results of Collaboration
Client
Supplier
New product
A
Ac ANE ¼ 40 Bc ANE ¼ 70 Cc ANE ¼ 28,000
As ANE ¼ 800 Bs ANE ¼ 4,000 Cs ANE ¼ 900
Electronic toys
B Table IV. Profile of the companies who applied the self-assessment system
Table V. Profiles of the interviewees
C
Year of collaboration 5
Electronic toys 4 Electronic parts 13
Note: ANE ¼ approximate number of employees
Collaboration
Client
Supplier
A B C
Operations manager Senior engineering manager Material manager
Engineering manager Sales manager Engineering manager
Self-assessment of conflict management
Company Performances on Selected Areas 100% 80%
79%
74% 49%
70%
Ac
69%
48%
705
Percentage Score Co nf lic tm an ag em en t 1. Re la tio ns hi p m an a.. . 2. Co nf lic th an dl in g. .. 3. N PD pr oc es sm an ag ... 4. Co m m un ic at io n
60%
100%
93%
40% 20%
0%
0%
0%
As
Figure 8. Assessment results of collaboration A
Areas
Company Performances on Selected Areas 100% 80%
Bc
60%
50%
61%
50%
Percentage Score Co nf lic tm an ag em en t 1. Re la tio ns hi p m an a.. . 2. Co nf lic th an dl in g. .. 3. N PD pr oc es sm an ag ... 4. Co m m un ic at io n
44%
59%
40%
35%
40%
33%
20% 0%
3%
0%
Bs
Areas
sub-criterion 3.4 NPD progress monitoring. The sub-criterion is assessed through three measurement items composed of approach and deployment dimensions. It can be noted that both the assessments of the three measurement items are incomplete, indicating the assessor was not 100 percent sure about the practices. By synthesizing the degrees of belief of the three measurement items, the aggregated assessment of sub-criterion 3.4 can be obtained. By this approach, the diversity of the lower hierarchies can be preserved in the upper hierarchies, which provides linkages between assessment results and the identification of strengths and areas for improvement. The system can display graphically the distributed assessment of any attribute. As an illustration, Figure 11 shows the distributed assessment of conflict management of company Cs. Based on the distribution of the assessment over the evaluation grades, the company can identify their strengths and weaknesses easily. It can be
Figure 9. Assessment results of collaboration B
IMDS 107,5
Company Performances on Selected Areas 100% 80%
80% 82%
79% 67% 69%
90% 87%
69%
Cc
706
Percentage Score Co nf lic tm an ag em en t 1. Re la tio ns hi p m an a.. . 2. Co nf lic th an dl in g. .. 3. N PD pr oc es sm an ag ... 4. Co m m un ic at io n
60% 40% 20%
15%
9%
0%
Figure 10. Assessment results of collaboration C
Cs
Areas
noted from Figure 11 that 16.22 percent of the assessment fall into the category of “Unaware” which indicates the areas of which action plans need to be developed for improvement. Moreover, the strengths can also be determined based on the assessment on the grade of “Achiever” (34.29 percent). In general, attributes which are assessed to be “Unaware” “Uncommitted” and “Beginner” are considered to be weaknesses, while those fall into “Achiever” and “Improver” are regarded as strengths. However, it depends on situation of the company. For instance, when the company pursues a conflict management adoption status of “Achiever” “Improver” would be considered to be the weakness. On the other hand, when the company wants to move towards “Beginner” from “Uncommitted” “Improver” would be viewed to be the strength. In short, by looking at the distributed assessment, assessors can be provided with a precise picture of the conflict management performance. More importantly, it facilitates the identification of strengths and weaknesses, and helps develop action plans for conflict management improvement. 6.3 Utility intervals As stated previously, the ER approach can generate overall assessment results by using utility intervals to tackle the problem of incomplete assessment. To cite company Cs as an example, 7.28 percent of the assessment is assigned to “Unknown” indicating the existence of incomplete assessment. Based on the utility intervals equations, the worst possible and best possible utilities can be calculated to reveal the possible intervals of the performance, which are shown in Figure 12. 6.4 Self-assessment as a platform for improving the conflict management practices of collaborating parties Basically, the measurement items can be classified into two categories. The first category, which we call it individual items, assesses the practices which can be successfully accomplished by a single party. For example, “2.3.3. Does your company provide proper training and education to improve employees’ conflict handling skills?”
Distributed assessment 3.4.1 3.4.2 3.4.3 Aggregated assessment 3.4
Measurement item 0 0 0 0
0
H2
0 0 0
H1
0.0701
0.25 0 0
H3
0.2189
0.25 0.4179 0
H4
0.5109
0 0.4179 0.93
H5
0.2001
0.5 0.1642 0.07
Unassigned
0.9102
0.8125 0.8955 1
Max. utility
0.7101
0.3125 0.7313 0.93
Min. utility
0.8102
0.5625 0.8134 0.9650
Average utility
Self-assessment of conflict management 707
Table VI. Distributed assessment of 3.4 NPD progress monitoring of company Cs
IMDS 107,5
Cs on Conflict management 100.00% 90.00% 80.00%
708 Belief degree
70.00% 60.00% 50.00% 39.01%
40.00%
34.29%
30.00% 20.00%
16.22%
10.00% 0.00% Uncommitted
0.00%
Figure 11. Distributed assessment of conflict management of company Cs
Unaware
7.28%
3.20% Improver Beginner
Unknown Achiever
Evaluation grades
Assessment of Cs on Conflict management 1.0000 0.9000 0.8000
Utility
0.7000
0.6514
0.6878
0.7243
0.6000 0.5000 0.4000 0.3000 0.2000
Figure 12. Utility interval of the conflict management performance of company Cs
0.1000 0.0000 Worst possible
Average
Best possible
Utility interval
A company, client or supplier, can provide the training and education without the involvement of their partner. Another category of measurement items, called joint items, deals with the practices that can be successfully achieved only by the participation of both parties. For example, “3.2.2. Does your company allocate the
development tasks with the partner, with detailed descriptions of the responsibility and authority of each party?” Measurement item 3.2.2 deals with the allocation of development tasks. A clear and mutually agreed task allocation, which can avoid conflict, necessitates the participation of both parties at the early stage of NPD. Figure 13 shows the assessments of Bc and Bs on the measurement item, revealing that the two parties have diverse views of the approach dimension. The comparisons of the assessment results enable collaborating parties to understand the views of two parties on joint items. It provides a platform for clients and suppliers to look into the underlying causes of the differences of their assessments, and explore how their practices can be improved together.
Self-assessment of conflict management 709
6.5 Evaluation of the self-assessment system To evaluate the applicability of the self-assessment to collaborative NPD, the six companies were asked to complete a 12-item questionnaire shown in Table VII. There are four types of evaluation. The first one deals with the ability of the system in raising the awareness and understanding of conflict management. The six companies all considered that they were more concerned about conflict management and recognized its importance after using the system. The second type of evaluation measures the accuracy of the system in assessing the performance of their conflict management, and identifying strengths and weaknesses. The assessors strongly agreed that the system can accurately identify their companies’ strengths and weaknesses. They gave a score of 5.17 (out 1-7 scale in which 7 is the best) to the ability of the system to assess the overall performance of their conflict management. Such a high mean score indicates satisfactory performance on the developed system. Four questions were employed to assess the usefulness of the system in helping improve the performance of their conflict management. Generally, they agreed that the system is useful in assisting them and their partners in improving the conflict management. However, one respondent argued that the assessment results were not able to help prioritize the areas for improvement because there are other considerations such as financial and human resources, resistant to change and capability. The final type of evaluation is the usability of the system, which assesses user’s satisfaction of Company Performances on Selected Areas
80%
Bc
75% 62%
60%
50%
50%
50%
50%
40% 20% 3. 2. 2. D ep lo ym en t
3. 2. 2. A pp ro ac h
yo ur co m ...
0%
3. 2. 2. D oe s
Percentage Score
100%
Areas
Bs
Figure 13. Comparison of the assessment results of companies Bc and Bs
Table VII. Results of the self-assessment evaluation survey
Usability of the system
Usefulness in helping improve the performance of conflict management
Accuracy in assessing the performance of conflict management, and identifying strengths and weaknesses
Ability in raising the awareness and understanding of conflict management
1. Your company has become more aware of conflict management after using the system 2. Your company has gained more understanding on conflict management after using the system 3. The system can assess your company’s performance of conflict management 4. The system can identify the areas where your company is performing well 5. The system can identify the areas where your company is performing in poor ways 6. The system can help identify the areas for improvement 7. The system can help determine the priority of the improvement areas 8. The analysis of the system could be useful in developing action plans for improving the performance of conflict management 9. The system can be a useful platform for your company and the partner to assess and improve the performance of conflict management 10. The system is easy to use 11. The interface of the system is user-friendly 12. The time spent on the self-assessment is reasonable
Evaluation item 1-7 Likert scale: strongly disagree 1234567 strongly agree
0.632 1.751 0.816 0.516 0.753 0.548 0.837
5.33 5.67 5.67 5.17 5.50 5.50
0.632
6.00 6.00
0.753 0.632
0.516
5.67 5.17 6.00
0.548
Standard deviation
5.50
Mean
710
Type of evaluation
IMDS 107,5
the use of the system. The assessors considered the time required to conduct the assessment was reasonable. The six companies spent about 1-2 hours to complete the self-assessment. Moreover, they also considered the system was user-friendly and quite easy to use. 7. Conclusion Self-assessment has been widely adopted in the field of quality management on the basis of quality models such as MBNQ and EFQM. It is well recognized that self-assessment is an important tool for achieving business excellence. The application of self-assessment in conflict management, however, has not been reported. This paper explores the use of self-assessment in conflict management. On the basis of the hierarchy model of conflict management, we develop a self-assessment system of conflict management. Using the ER scoring approach, organizations can assess their conflict management practices in an accurate way. Moreover, we propose a PAIR process which provides a systematic approach for clients and suppliers to continually assess and improve their conflict management. The implementation of the self-assessment system in three collaboration validates that the system is able to raise the awareness and understanding of conflict management, assess accurately conflict management performance, identify strengths and areas for improvement, and help improve the performance of conflict management as well. In short, the proposed system provides a platform for clients and suppliers to continually improve their conflict management and in turn NPD performance. The assessment results show that the six companies belong to “Uncommitted” or “Beginners” which indicate there is room for improving their conflict management. In fact, most of companies practice quite satisfactorily in the aspects of relationship management, NPD process management and communication. Their common weak area is conflict handling system as they scored range from 0 to 15 percent in this aspect. The findings suggest that conflict management is a neglected issue in collaborative NPD. Collaborating parties need to devote substantial efforts to the establishment of conflict management practices, in which the self-assessment system could play a crucial role. References Brown, M.G. (1997), “Measuring up against the 1997 Baldrige criteria”, Journal for Quality & Participation, September, pp. 22-8. Caffyn, S. (1999), “Development of a continuous improvement self-assessment tool”, International Journal of Operation and Production Management, Vol. 19 No. 11, pp. 1138-53. Chin, K.S., Pun, K.F., Xu, Y. and Chan, J. (2002), “An AHP based study of critical factors for TQM implementation in Shanghai manufacturing industries”, International Journal of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Vol. 22 No. 11, pp. 707-15. Choy, C.S., Yew, W.K. and Lin, B. (2006), “Criteria for measuring KM performance outcomes in organizations”, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 106 No. 7, pp. 917-36. Cooper, R.G. (1998), Product Leadership: Creating and Launching Superior New Products, Perseus Books, Cambridge, MA. Craig, A. and Hart, S. (1992), “Where to now in new product development research”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 26 No. 11, pp. 1-49. Dyer, B. and Song, X.M. (1998), “Innovation strategy and sanctioned conflict: a new edge in innovation”, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 15, pp. 505-19.
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[email protected]
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