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The purpose of this paper is to show a real experience of how a scheme of continuous improvement has been gradually transformed, from a very unsuccessful start, passing through different phases and finally delivering results for the firm.

The authors analyse the evolution of the formal programs of continuous improvement of a firm in a traditional sector (food). The data for the research were gathered by means of participatory observation over the course of 18 months spent in the firm attending the meetings of the improvement teams.

Both programs (individual and group) have proved to be very profitable for the company. However, there is no magic formula for the correct operation of the system of continuous improvement. The existing system has to be continually improved, correcting faults and trying always to contribute something new to re‐launch the system regularly.

This study has also permitted the authors to highlight the importance of continuous improvement in the firm from both the economic point of view and that of worker development.

The investigation aims to help to cover the lack of longitudinal case studies of continuous improvement.

Consumers who share their suggestions with firms contribute valuable knowledge and both exhibit and reinforce positive customer engagement. Yet, the motivational antecedents of direct-to-firm customer suggestion sharing remain understudied. This study aims to investigate how potential self, other customer and firm benefits motivate consumer suggestion sharing.

A critical incident pretest explores the domain and establishes ecological validity. Two scenario-based experimental studies test the proposed relationships in distinct service contexts.

Results support a prosocial (helpful) view of suggestion sharing – potential benefits to other customers motivate suggestion sharing. Potential benefits for the firm play two roles, namely, they indirectly motivate suggestion sharing by increasing consumers’ perceived outcome expectancy, illustrating a pragmatic mechanism, and they directly motivate suggestion sharing when service quality is high, illustrating a conditional, reciprocity-driven mechanism. When service quality is low, consumers are less likely to share firm-benefitting suggestions and more likely to share non-beneficial suggestions, highlighting a potential low service quality “trap” in which firms can become stuck.

Future research is needed to study the antecedents of attitude toward suggestion sharing and the effect of relationship strength on suggestion sharing.

Managerially, multiple paths are identified by which firms can motivate suggestion sharing. The low-service quality “trap” indicates that low-service quality firms should not rely on, and should perhaps even ignore, customer suggestions as a tool for improving their offerings.

By experimentally investigating the motivational antecedents of direct-to-firm consumer suggestion sharing, this paper fills a gap in extant research and provides a foundation upon which future suggestion sharing research can build.

The purpose of this paper is to perform a context analysis about a specific Kaizen program, suggestion systems in permanent teams, and identified the barriers and facilitators that companies encounter while implementing them from the workers’ perspective.

The authors applied an inductive method, the Grounded Theory, to develop a specific context theory using the information that emerged from a convenience sample of 182 workers in several countries.

The facilitators and barriers identified for the workers in the field study are aligned with those identified in previous studies, generally obtained using information provided by managers. The methodology enabled us to identify the relationships between them and their level of relevance.

The main limitations were linked with the source of the data as the authors worked with a convenience sample and only analyzed the information provided by the workers.

The identified facilitators, their relationships and their relevance, contribute to understand the functioning phenomena of suggestion systems in permanent teams to facilitate organizations using this continuous improvement program more effectively.

The originality of this study, apart from identifying facilitators from the workers’ perspective, is that the used method enabled us to identify the relationships between them and know how the operators perceived their relevance.

Although the corporations widely use the suggestion schemes to elicit the creative ideas of their employee, sustaining a suggestion scheme is still a challenge. Employee suggestion schemes have been studied from many perspectives to illustrate its objectives, nature, content, process, significance and the benefits. Arguments have also been made with respect to the success and failures of the suggestion schemes. The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors to assess the sustainability of a suggestion system.

This paper thus explores the critical success factors of suggestion scheme through a literature review and filters the critical determinants for sustainability of suggestion using factor analysis. The data collection was done using a survey technique.

The results identity the five major factors as determinants to sustainability of a suggestion system as reported in the paper.

This paper has made an attempt to explore the determinants to assess the sustainability of a suggestion system and has contributed toward the new knowledge in terms of sustainability of a suggestion system.

The employees in an organisation are its eyes and ears, and their willingness to contribute with observations is essential to the internal information sharing. Literature suggests that an information system (IS) that is not used must be redesigned to suit the users. This article argues that malfunctioning IS might be understood from a management control perspective, i.e. that the employees rather choose to engage in other duties than documenting and retrieving information from an existing IS. They perceive such ditties as more valuable to them and to the organisation, which results in low utilisation of the systems. Managerial interventions can, however, stimulate data entry and asynchronous communication between individuals by manifesting that information sharing is an important organisational issue through agreement on objectives, performance monitoring and evaluation, feedback mechanisms and analysis and action plans.

This paper hypothesized that ratees who share their multisource feedback with raters and ask for suggestions would improve more than other ratees. The participants were 5,335 ratees in a large, global corporation who received multisource feedback. Nine months after the initial survey, there was a follow‐up survey in which raters indicated whether the feedback recipient had shared the feedback and asked for suggestions. One year after the initial survey, there was a second multisource feedback survey. It was found that sharing feedback and asking for suggestions accounted for only a very small (albeit statistically significant) proportion of variance in improvement over time. This paper discusses factors that may affect the impact of sharing feedback and asking for suggestions following multisource feedback.

Discusses the management philosophy and productivity principles utilized by Singapore′s ministry of defence in the light of that country′s limited resources and reliance on people for growth and development. States the guiding principles of the Mindef Productivity Movement, how productivity is defined, personnel participation systems, feedback and evaluation, and Work Improvement Team systems, in addition to publicity and promotion of the movement.

Increase the workforce involvement in continuous improvement activities is one of the main recommendations of the recent report Rethinking Construction, developed by the UK Construction Task Force. In Brazil, this is also a major issue in most government and industry initiatives for the sector, particularly after the opening of the economy in the mid‐1980s. In this context, this research attempts to contribute to policy making by assessing the degree of workforce involvement in continuous improvement in English and Brazilian construction sites. The results show a generalised poor level of workforce involvement in comparison to the reported practices of other industrial sectors. Hence, the results suggest that current strategies for promoting continuous improvement in the construction sector are failing to bring real change at the operational level due to the lack of leadership and appropriate win‐win relationships.

The study aims to develop an organizational culture typology and explore how different logistics service provider (LSP) and customer archetypes interact to generate performance improvements in logistics outsourcing relationships.

A multiple case study approach with 12 dyads was employed. Interviews as well as public and internal data from LSPs and customers were analyzed.

The results reveal four archetypes each for LSPs and customers, characterized by two dimensions: “activeness” and “openness”. Furthermore, analyzing the interaction among the archetypes, three relationship patterns are identified (“static”, “restrained”, and “progressive”) that differ in the exploratory and exploitative improvement outcomes.

The study contributes to theory development at the intersection of organizational culture and logistics outsourcing.

The study provides a typology of organizational culture in logistics outsourcing and how different archetypes interact to generate improvements.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the history and existing research on continuous improvement (CI).

Extensive review of the literature.

This paper provides an overview of CI, its inception, how it evolved into sophisticated methodologies used in organizations today, and existing research in this field in the literature.

The literature on classification of CI has so far been very limited. The paper reviews a large number of papers in this field and presents the overview of various CI implementation practices demonstrated by manufacturing organizations globally. It also highlights the sophisticated CI methodologies suggested by various researchers and practitioners in the field of CI.

The literature on classification of CI has so far been very limited. The paper reviews a large number of papers in this field and presents the overview of various CI implementation practices demonstrated by manufacturing organizations globally. It also highlights the sophisticated CI methodologies suggested by various researchers and practitioners in the field of CI.

The paper contains a comprehensive listing of publications on the field in question and its classification. It will be useful to researchers, improvement professionals and others concerned with improvement to understand the significance of CI. It should be of value to practitioners of CI programmes and to academics who are interested in how CI has evolved, and where it is today. To the authors’ knowledge, no recent papers have provided an historical perspective of CI.