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The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a psychoeducational support group for informal carers of people with Huntington's disease (HD).

A clinical intervention was designed by a specialist HD service in consultation with HD carers, building on resources from a generic programme for carers, to meet the specific needs of HD families. A mixed methods, repeated measures design was used to examine any potential benefits this had on carer confidence and quality of life, and to ascertain the most beneficial aspects of the programme.

At the end of the group, participants reported feeling more confident in caring for relatives with HD. Carers reported that gaining new information and being with other carers was helpful.

Although participant numbers were small, this pilot indicates that informal carers of HD patients appear to value psychoeducational support delivered in a group format. Evaluation of this type of intervention for carers warrants more rigorous investigation.

There is a paucity of research that evaluates the impact of HD-specific carer interventions. This offers a description of a unique intervention that was aimed to increase knowledge and confidence among HD carers and to help provide the basis for more comprehensive services to be offered to carers of this devastating genetic illness.

Psychiatric assessment in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID) is complex and challenging. With co-occurring congenital blindness, this complexity is increased. Systematic knowledge about psychiatric assessment in this combination of challenges is virtually non-existing, and there is little guidance available for clinicians faced with this task. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Experiences from comprehensive psychiatric assessments in two adults with congenital blindness, ASD, and ID are explored and discussed.

Adaptation of assessment procedures usually employed for individuals with ASD and ID involved no major alteration, but co-operation between mental health and visual impairment professionals was important, as was the involvement of the families of the individuals in question. In both cases, the patient met criteria for an anxiety disorder, underlining the vulnerability and the challenges involved in living with this combination of challenges.

There is an urgent need for research into mental health issues for this group, including case studies describing successful treatment or intervention for these issues.

Psychiatric assessment in individuals with this combination of challenges may be feasible, but requires involvement of professionals specializing in mental health in developmental disabilities, and professionals in visual impairment. Assessments need to be individually adapted.

This is the first study systematically describing psychiatric assessment in this group involving the use of checklists and assessment tools. Strategies and tools that were useful are described and discussed to aid other clinicians faced with similar challenges.

This study aims to describe how the Hoshin Kanri (HK) strategic methodology facilitates implementation of lean management (LM), achieving greater integration of the strategic and operational levels, resulting in higher performance level.

The authors conducted an in-depth case study of a top-10 Spanish food retail company with experience in HK and LM. First, the authors conducted 17 semi-structured interviews with the management team. Second, the authors analyzed all minutes from meetings of the key management entities for HK monitoring over a period of 3 years (2016–2019). Third, the authors evaluated the reports and key scorecards for the same period. Finally, authors visited the operating facilities and attended multiple team management meetings.

This study demonstrates that deploying HK creates the strategic ecosystem for operations management that facilitates successful implementation of LM. By sharing common cultural concepts, both methodologies generate faster transformation of the organization and thus push it towards its strategic objectives with more determination and better performance.

The lack of strategic alignment is one of the most important reasons for LM failure. Although HK is a strategic methodology that facilitates this alignment, a gap exists in the literature on the benefits of HK for implementation of continuous improvement initiatives such as LM. Our research shows how HK enables a participative connection between the strategic and operational areas of the firm that reinforces the fundamental elements of LM. Employee involvement, widespread use of plan-do-check-act (PDCA) methodology and multidisciplinary work (among other effects) make HK a key element for successful implementation of LM.

Total quality management has seen a tremendous rise of popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Aims to question the effectiveness, utility and use of TQM among many people – practitioners, as well as academics.

Discusses the lack of common interpretations of TQM based on literature study. The answer to the question whether TQM is a marvel or malpractice depends on several factors, for instance, in what kinds of organizations TQM is applied, what interpretation of TQM is made, and what input the theorists and practitioners have, i.e. their earlier environment, culture and values. Often respondents and opponents use the same word but mean different things.

TQM should not be rejected as a whole if one or even, many applications fail. TQM should, however, be applied with considerable consideration of the specifics of the target organization, the purpose of the organization, and the purpose of applying TQM.

The paper emphasizes the lack of common interpretations of TQM.

The authors estimate the effect of the gender composition of company boards on firm performance by exploiting variation in the percentage of women after the implementation of a 2011 Belgian policy reform, which introduced a gender quota for listed companies.

The authors analyze the evolution of firm performance between companies that were subjected to the quota law and compare it with the performance of similar firms that were not subjected to the law. This difference-in-difference (DiD) approach allows the authors to avoid the potential bias resulting from unobserved firm characteristics.

The authors find that the quota policy resulted in the replacement of about one male director by a female one in the average firm between 2010 and 2017. However, this increase in diversity appears to have negatively affected some firm performance indicators. The authors find statistically significant negative effects for 10 out of the 23 financial indicators included in this study, while the other 13 indicators showed no significant effect.

The originality of this research lies in both the methodology and the findings. The policy reform that the authors study can be regarded as a natural experiment so that the DiD method provides estimates of the causal effect of the gender composition of company boards on firm performance. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that presents causal evidence of negative effects of gender quota on organizational performance. These results cast doubts on the business case argument for gender quota and show that results from correlational studies are likely to be biased upward.

The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the interaction-sensitive skills medical practitioners enact as they manage multiple organizational factors in the context of discharging patients.

For that purpose, we carried out a cognitive ethnographic study in a Danish hospital, where we video-recorded three pre-ward round meetings, five discharge conversations and conducted seven semi-structured interviews. Fieldnotes and interview transcripts were analyzed using the method Cognitive Task Analysis, and video-recordings were analyzed via the interactivity-based approach Cognitive Event Analysis.

Our findings show that practitioners coordinate multi-scalar resources (e.g. verbal patterns and cognitive artifacts) in order to discharge patients in a safe and integrated way, which we propose amounts to the social and intercorporeal ability to align simultaneously emerging factors, like organizational procedures in the hospital, artifacts in use, sociocultural resources and the individual medical expertise of the practitioner in the emerging social interaction with the patient. In pursing this claim, we investigate the linguistic and cognitive processes emerging in a single case study of a nurse who discharges a patient. We propose that the interaction-sensitive skill which enables the nurse to solve the task of discharging the patient can be characterized via hybrid cognition.

Thus, the value of the article is dual: On the one hand, it empirically contributes with knowledge of the complex organizational structures that constrains micro-level medical interactions in discharges, and on the other, the article contributes theoretically with a hybrid cognitive framework that allows organizational researchers to understand and assess complex cognitive and linguistic processes that goes into the social micro-coordination in complex organizational-medical task.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the present level of the adoption of TQM in firms, and to outline an evaluation of its evolving path.

A qualitative method was chosen to analyze the “state‐of‐the‐art” of TQM. A total of 21 firms were investigated, using the case study method, in detailed multiple case studies.

In most of the investigated firms, TQM was characterized by stronger and stronger cultural and behavioural features. The co‐ordinated and systematic development of TQM basic factors helps the priming and feeding of innovative processes favouring the course towards business excellence.

The research is based on a sample of firms and it is necessary to amplify the research process including other enterprises and to outline some forms of categories (with cultural and behavioural aspects).

If TQM is appropriately managed, it supports the organization in achieving excellence, the real source of stakeholder value's continuous creation. In order to achieve business excellence and stakeholder value, TQM importance can be found in two main levels: developing a strategic dimension and the organizational dimension of synergies among TQM, business excellence and stakeholder value.

This paper provides an important contribution in the understanding of the evolution of TQM, stressing theoretical and practical implications in a new perspective. This is a composite perspective based on three elements: innovation, excellence, and value.

Interest and research on workplace learning has intensified in recent years, however, research on assessing how employees facilitate each other's learning through everyday work experiences and how organizational contextual factors promote or impede the facilitation of others' learning at work is underdeveloped. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to explore how employees facilitate others' learning and the contextual factors that influence employees' facilitation of others' learning in a workplace setting.

A qualitative case study approach was selected for this study. An adaptation of the critical incident technique and semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were conducted with 13 employees representing various functional areas within a learning‐oriented consumer‐focused manufacturer. Content analysis and constant comparative analysis were the approaches used to analyze the data.

Several findings emerged that describe the catalysts for employees' facilitating others' learning, the behaviors that facilitators engaged to facilitate others' learning, and the perceived outcomes from facilitating learning. Several positive and negative organizational contextual factors emerged that influence the facilitation of others' learning. Specifically, the role of learning‐committed leadership, manifested in several ways, emerged as a powerful organizational contextual factor.

The findings from case study research are not intended to be generalizable. The use of self‐report data is another limitation, as are recollections of critical incidents. However, integrating multiple sources of data collection was an attempt to allow for triangulation of findings.

The findings depict the importance of leadership and management in the process of facilitating learning and the extent to which leaders and managers can create organizational environments conducive to the facilitation of learning that has implications for management and leadership development programs. This study also identifies avenues for future research.

This paper contributes to research that explores how employees facilitate others' learning and the contextual factors that influence employees' facilitation of others' learning in a workplace setting.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Philip B. Crosby’s 14 quality principles and analyze the interaction between them. Hitherto no research has been published on the implementation of total quality management (TQM) using Crosby’s 14 principles. To fill this gap, interpretive structural modeling (ISM) and Matrix Impact Cross-Reference Multiplication Applied to a Classification (MICMAC) analysis have been designed to prioritize, sequence and categorize variables to find both the dependence and driving power of these variables.

At the initial stage experts from industry as well as from academia were contacted to provide an input for ISM methodology and examine interactions between identified variables. In this approach, interpretations of the interrelationships among variables have been discussed, whereas MICMAC analysis is used to discover dependence and driving power.

The results of the investigation revealed that “Management Commitment,” “Quality Improvement Team,” “Quality Awareness,” “Supervisor Training,” “Goal Setting” and “Cost of Quality Evaluation” are strategic requirements; “Corrective Action,” “Zero Defects Day” and “Error Cause Removal” are tactical requirements. “Recognition,” “Quality Measurement,” “Quality Councils” and “Do It Over Again” are operational requirements for TQM applications.

ISM is used as a part of this research to provide valuable insights into interrelationships among Crosby’s quality principles through a systematic framework. The research opens up a new focus area on the implementation of TQM for services as well as for the manufacturing industry.