Quality management for corporate staff functions: the public affairs example

Abstract

This paper discusses the adoption of quality management programmes and techniques within the corporate public affairs function. Although total quality management programmes and techniques are being rapidly assimilated within organizational production and operations areas, they are adopted much more slowly in “softer” organizational areas. The contexts and processes surrounding the adoption of quality in corporate staff areas like public affairs, which primarily produce policy-oriented outputs, has received measurably less attention than manufacturing areas which produce material goods for consumption. This shortcoming is addressed by describing quality in a specific corporate staff function context, the public affairs area. Using information gathered from 25 semi-structured interviews of senior public affairs officers and questionnaire survey research of nearly 450 top-level North American-based public affairs officers, this paper identifies commonly experienced barriers to quality adoption and implementation in public affairs. It also provides descriptions of the processes by which several of the leading corporate North American public affairs functions are addressing quality in their areas. A special focus is placed on how quality programmes are used by public affairs officers to demonstrate empirically improved functional performance.