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The Effectiveness of Management-By-Walking- Around
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Management-By-Walking-Around (MBWA) is a widely adopted technique in hospitals that involves
senior managers directly observing frontline work. However, few studies have rigorously examined
its impact on organizational outcomes. This paper examines an improvement program based on
MBWA in which senior managers observe frontline employees, solicit ideas about improvement
opportunities, and work with staff to resolve the issues. We randomly selected 19 hospitals to
implement the 18-month long MBWA-based improvement program; 56 work areas participated. We
find that the program, on average, had a negative impact on performance. To explain this surprising
finding, we use mixed methods to examine the impact of the work area’s problem solving approach.
Results suggest that prioritizing easy-to-solve problems was associated with improved performance.
We believe this was because it resulted in greater action taking. A different approach was
characterized by prioritizing high value problems, which was not successful in our study. We also
find that assigning to senior managers responsibility for ensuring that identified problems get
resolved resulted in better performance. Overall, our study suggests that senior managers’ physical
presence on their organizations’ frontlines was not helpful unless it enabled active problem solving.
Anita L. Tucker and Sara J. Singer - Personal Name
NONE
Management
English
2013
1-38
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