An empirical study of implementation of EFQM method for broadcasting organization in Iran

Article history: Received October 20, 2012 Received in revised format 5 January 2013 Accepted 19 January 2013 Available online January 2


Introduction
During the last few years, there have been significant efforts on developing effective business excellence models to improve the quality of organizations including governmental or nongovernmental organizations.A typical business excellence model enhances various alternatives with different budget and the objective is to implement the best ones.There are various methods for organizational excellence to detect weakness and strength in home appliances industry.Deming (1986Deming ( , 2000) ) is one of the most popular models for assessing organizational excellence.Deming, in his model, focuses on four issues for improving business issues, which are as follows, 1. Appreciation of a system: understanding the overall processes including suppliers, producers, and customers of goods and services, 2. Knowledge of variation: the range and causes of differentiation in quality, and use of statistical sampling in measurements, 3. Theory of knowledge: the ideas of explaining knowledge and the limits of what can be known, 4. Knowledge of psychology: concepts of human nature.
Deming specified 14 step key principles for management of transforming businesses into effectiveness ones.Business excellence, as explained by the European foundation for quality management (EFQM), refers to "outstanding practices in managing the organization and achieving results, all based on a set of eight fundamental concepts".These concepts are primary orientation on balanced achievements, concentrate on customer value, leadership and constancy of purpose, management by processes and facts, people development and involvement including continuous learning, innovation and improvement, partnership development and public responsibility (Link & Scott, 2001;Hakes, 2007).Gharakhani et al. (2011) presented a robust LINMAP method for measuring the relative importance of different alternatives in an EFQM self assessment.Their model was capable of handling uncertainty as part of the problem formulation and they used it for a case-study of energy sector in Iran with different alternatives.The orderings of the alternatives were measured using data from multiple experts through applying the proposed model of this paper.Kazemi et al. (2011) performed an investigation and determined its components and aspects, prioritized the components and analyzed relationship among various aspects of organizational excellence model at cellulose industry of Iran.Their results indicated that organizational excellence pattern of cellulose industry was a mixture of various aspects of technical, economic, inner environment, outer environment, motivation and behavioral processes.Kazemi et al. (2012) did another survey in home appliances industry.

The proposed study
The proposed study of this paper investigates the impact of having EFQM in broadcasting organization.The case study of this paper includes all managers who worked for this organization in city of Tehran, Iran.The sample size is calculated as follows, where N is the population size, and N=200, the number of sample size is calculated as n=149.In our study, 126 particiopants represnting 88.7% were male and the remaining 16 people representing 11.3% were female.Fig. 1 shows some personal characteristics of the participants in terms of the educational background as well as job experinces. of science and the remaining 48 people or 33.8% hold master degree or higher.In addition, 75.35% of the participants had over 20 years of job experience, which means the people were highly qualified to answer or survey.There are 22 items associated with the proposed study of this survey including begin customer and output oriented, leader and target establishment, management based on facts and figures, employee partnership, innovation, partnership, etc.We have designed a questionnaire based on these items and distributed it among all experts.All questions were designed based Likert scale.

Results
As we have explained, there are 22 items associated with the proposed study of this survey and Table 1 summarizes them with some detailed explanations, point assigned and their rankings.

Table 1
The summary of the criteria and their relative ranking According to the results of Table 1, tribute towards staff and employees is number one priority in our survey, followed by keeping country's prestige and being attractive for all audiences.Leader and target establishment as well as religious awareness have received the same point coming to the fourth position in terms of priority.We any attribute whose point is more than 142 and therefore, ten criteria are selected.We also add two additional criteria based on Deming method (Deming, 1986;Deming, 2000) leaving us to the following 12 criteria summarized in Table 2 for EFQM assessment.Based on the results of Table 2, leadership is number one priority followed by strategy, contribution for society.We have performed an in depth discussion among experts to adopt a new version of EFQM for the case study of our proposed model.Based on the comments and feedbacks we have received, we have concluded that standard EFQM with twelve criteria could be adopted for this organization.The criteria are divided into two classifications of empowering and packages.We also recommend supportive criteria as part of EFQM model assessment.Table 3 demonstrates the results of our survey along with points given to these criteria.Next, we have also investigated all sub criteria associated with main criteria.Table 4 demonstrates the summary of our investigation for leadership and its sub criteria.Leaders must detect any change and take necessary actions 189 3 As we can observe from the results of Table 4, people are very concern with leaders' behavior and they expect them to act as well as they could.They are also highly expected their leaders to encourage them when they come with some new ideas.Strategy is another component of EFQM model, which includes four sub criteria in Table 5 as follows, Based on the results of Table 5, experts believe that all strategies must be updated on regular basis and they all must be arranged based on in depth investigations.Human resources include five sub criteria, which are summarized in Table 6 as follows, As we can observe from Table 6, knowledge and knowledgeable employees must be detected and they must be appreciated, properly.Firms and partnerships are another component of this survey and Table 7 summarizes the results of our survey for firms and partnerships while Table 8 is dedicated for five components associated with processes.

Table 2
The results of ranking for 12 suggested criteria of EFQM

Table 5
The results of our survey for strategy components

Table 6
The results of our survey for human resource components

Table 7
The results of our survey for Firms and Partnership components Based on the results of Table7 and Table 8, managing financial resources as well as customer relationship management are the most important factors associated with firms and processes' components.In our EFQM model, customer is another important component of our model with two sub criteria including getting feedback from customers and interpreting their feedback and setting up