The Role of Experience in Six Sigma Project Success: An Empirical Analysis of Improvement Projects
Item
Title
The Role of Experience in Six Sigma Project Success: An Empirical Analysis of Improvement Projects
Abstract/Description
Recent learning-by-doing research highlights the importance of examining multiple measures of experience and their relationship to the performance of work teams. Our paper studies the role of individual experience, organizational experience, team leader experience, and experience working together on a team (team familiarity) in the context of improvement teams. To do so, we analyze successful and failed six sigma improvement team projects at a Fortune 500 consumer products manufacturer with multiple business groups. Such improvement project teams focus on deliberate learning, which differs from the primary focus of work teams. Our analysis uses archival data generated by these improvement project teams over a six year time span. Of the four experience variables we study, we find that team leader experience exhibits the strongest relationship with project success, followed by organizational experience. Further, in contrast to prior-related research on work teams, we find no relationship between individual experience or team familiarity and project success beyond that explained by team leader and organizational experience. These results suggest that a well-developed and deployed structured problem-solving process—characteristic of effective six sigma deployments—may reduce the importance of team familiarity in the context of improvement teams.
Author/creator
Date
In publication
Volume
30
Issue
7-8
Pages
481-493
Resource type
Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form
Published Text
Scholarship genre
Empirical
Keywords
Open access/full-text available
No
Peer reviewed
Yes
ISSN
1873-1317
Citation
Easton, G. S., & Rosenzweig, E. D. (2012). The Role of Experience in Six Sigma Project Success: An Empirical Analysis of Improvement Projects. Journal of Operations Management, 30(7–8), 481–493. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2012.08.002
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