title: Aligning internal organizational factors with a service excellence mission: an exploratory investigation in health care.
abstract: In today's competitive health care environment, service excellence is rapidly becoming a major differentiating advantage between health care providers. Too often, senior executives talk about their commitment to a mission statement that extols the virtues of providing world class service to their patients only to undermine those statements with what they do, write, and say. This article presents an exploratory investigation into a new application of an internal mission alignment instrument that seeks to assess the extent to which an organization's internal processes are aligned with its service mission. This instrument was sent to 250 randomly selected employees from all clinical departments of a large southeastern hospital to explore the underlying alignment factors. A factor analysis of the data revealed eight factors that predicted beneficial employee outcomes such as organizational commitment and satisfaction with the job and organization.
authors.affiliation: College of Business Administration, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA. rford@bus.ucf.edu
authors.forename: Robert C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Ford
authors.forename: Stephen A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Sivo
authors.forename: Myron D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Fottler
authors.forename: Duncan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Dickson
authors.forename: Kenneth
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Bradley
authors.forename: Lee
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Johnson
mesh_terms: D017598:Efficiency, Organizational; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006769:Hospitals, General / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D007588:Job Satisfaction; D009937:Organizational Objectives; D010564:Personnel, Hospital / Q000523:psychology*; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D015144:Southeastern United States