9 Common Barriers to Successful Performance Improvement

摘要

In section 8, we discussed factors that aid the diffusion of best practices related to organizational culture, implementation processes, and the practice itself. In this section, we discuss barriers at these three levels of analysis and also add a fourth dimension: barriers from the external environment. It is important to study barriers because regardless of which improvement framework is used, change projects are notoriously difficult to implement successfully. One study estimates that half of all major technology and administrative changes result in failure (Aiman- Smith and Green, 2002). Organizational transformation efforts have similar failure rates (Kotter, 2007). Failure can occur during any stage of an improvement effort and for many different reasons. On one hand, organizations can ignore a valuable innovation that could have resulted in improvement. On the other hand, adopting an ineffective innovation will lead to failure (Klein and Knight, 2005). Finally, faulty implementation of an otherwise effective innovation is also associated with failure (Klein and Knight, 2005).