Baldrige Criteria with Managing in a Changing Global Environment - Research Paper Example

In the healthcare sector, it is mandatory to keep performance up to the mark. Therefore, many healthcare organizations adopt the criteria of Baldrige to improve their performance as well as their businesses. According to Baldrige (2006), the seven criteria, upon which the basis of healthcare improvement depends, are the following:
• Process Management
• Work-force focus
• Focus on customers, patients, and markets
• Leadership
• Measurement, knowledge management, and analysis
• Strategic planning
• Results
Many authors have debated the validity and effectiveness of the Baldrige criteria. The reason is to identify the financial, marketing, and human resource outcomes as a result of implemented guidelines of Baldrige criteria because the core objective of any organization is to improve the performance of the pre-mentioned departments.


Financial and Marketing Outcomes
According to Baldrige (2006, p. 53), the purpose of identifying financial outcomes is to determine the financial health and results of the organization. It aims at understanding the financial sustainability, as well as the challenges and opportunities, which are present in the marketplace.
Usually, senior leadership assesses the financial performance of the organization. Appropriate financial indicators and measures include net assets, revenues, profits, budgets, cash-to-cash cycle, market position, financial stability, financial returns, and earnings per share (Baldrige National Quality Program, 2006).
The measures and indicators for tracking the marketing performance of an organization as per Baldrige criteria include market share, market position, new markets entered, measures of growth, new population served, entry into e-service for customers and patients, percentage of earnings resulting from new healthcare programs and services (Baldrige National Quality Program, 2006).
Human Resource Outcomes
The Human Resource outcomes of Baldrige criteria examine how well the organization is developing and maintaining a learning, productive and concerned working environment for its staff. The indicators and measures of performance for Human resources include job rotation, job classification, support staff, administrators, work layout, and working relationships among the staff of health care providers (Baldrige National Quality Program, 2006).
Jones (2008) has mentioned various strategies through which organizations could be managed in the changing global environment of business. The first step is to identify the uncertainty sources and complexity sources. It has to be examined how rapidly the environment is changing. An organization needs to conduct a cost-benefit analysis to find out how to utilize the available resources better.
According to Jones, “an organization needs to evaluate the benefits and costs of different inter-organizational strategies and choose the one that allows it to secure valuable resources in the most effective way” (2008, p. 85). To govern and maintain the exchanges between an organization and its people, Jones (2008) has put forward the concept of Transaction Cost (Jones, 2008).
The concepts of Jones (2008) can be compared with Baldrige criteria as Jones (2008) argues about scanning the specific and general environment. The specific environment primarily consists of those measures which directly influence the ability of an organization to preserve its resources. However, the general environment shapes the specific environment for every business.
While scanning the general and specific environments, organizations need to check the performance of major departments including the Human Resource Department, Finance Department, and Marketing Department. If the performance of every individual department is up to the mark, then the overall performance of the organization will enhance as well. This concept was mentioned in the seven integral factors of Baldrige criteria; within the context of strategic planning, for instance, it stressed the importance to align the performance of all the departments along with the goal of the organization (DeJong, 2009).
To improve the financial position of an organization, an organization needs to undergo various types of restructuring. Some of these restructuring measures mentioned by Jones (2008) include mergers and takeovers, franchising, outsourcing, cartels and collusion, joint venture, etc. This restructuring often proves to be utterly beneficial for the improvement of the financial performance of an organization. Read More