Introduction
The Malcolm Baldrige Prize is an award created by the United States Legislature in 1987 to enhance top-notch administration consciousness and to honor firms in the United States that have successfully integrated continuous improvement. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the country’s highest distinction for outstanding accomplishment. Baldrige assists firms in addressing a changing environment, focusing on objective strategic productivity, increasing customer and employee involvement, and improving administration and ethics, cultural obligations, competence, and protracted corporate stability. The Malcolm Baldrige Quality Management Program aims to strengthen the viability and management of American enterprises via organizational evaluation and enhancement for the advantage of all Americans.
The award is presented to organizations that are more than reasonable or even great; it is given to exceptional organizations. The Baldrige Award standards are difficult to meet, and only a few businesses can get it each year. The Baldrige Award is not a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because a single firm can win it more than once. Winning firms are expected to maintain and increase their world-class performance levels.
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Program gives comments and recommendations to award winners to assist them in this endeavor. The Malcolm Baldrige Award is a prestigious US award that recognizes firms that have excelled in quality and performance. The award will be presented by the Nationwide Institution of Standards and Machinery (NIST). The Baldrige trophy is a way of inspiring enterprises to keep aiming for distinction, as well as acknowledging prior successes (Ma, 2017). The award is given to companies that have improved their overall performance significantly. The recipient’s name is inscribed on a plaque in the White House.
Criteria for the Malcolm Baldridge Award
The award recognizes companies that make a lasting impression on other businesses. It aids firms in identifying improvement initiatives, achievements, gaps, chances, and threats, and identifying information management that needs to be improved. For entities to win the accolade, they must bid and meet the set performance expectations of the prize. Companies must apply and commit a deposit fee to consider the award expenditures.
Leadership is considered one of the criteria used in the Malcolm Baldridge Award. A leader’s behavior is portrayed in the eleven concepts and core values of the award. Leaders are expected to own and showcase exemplary behaviors concerned with delivering results, systems perspective, transparency and ethics, and visionary leadership. An innovative leader leads the firm in adhering to the organization’s core values and organizational visions. They invent strategies, methods, systems, and strategies to achieve organizational success. The leader ensures that the working environment is collaborative and supports the existence of unity among the workers. Visionary leaders are expected to motivate their colleagues to achieve high-quality output. Innovative leaders are prone to change and are ready to learn new skills from the environment and the colleagues around them.
The Malcolm Baldridge Award dictates how the organization develops strategic plans to meet its objective. How the company implements its strategic decisions is vital to the smooth running of the organization. Even though many businesses are becoming more skilled at strategy implementation, putting ideas into action remains a significant barrier. This is particularly the case in light of consumer demands for agility and preparedness in the case of unforeseen change, such as fluctuating economic situations, digital disruption, and destabilizing events that can derail an otherwise quick but predictable industry. This category emphasizes the need to focus not only on developing the ideas but also on the capacity to carry them out. The strategies should ensure that the customers are satisfied, and improve operational performance innovation and improvement.
Customers have a vital role in the Malcolm Baldridge selection criteria. The relationship between customers and the organization is of great concern in the selection procedure. Building a good relationship between the customers and the organization motivates the customers to engage more with the organization’s products, thereby increasing the organization’s income. A good relationship with customers helps market the organization to the outside world because of the market’s good reputation (Balunová, 2017). The organization is also bound to motivate and empower its workforce and involve them actively in the organizational strategies. The crew’s output depends on how the organization engages them because it encourages the employees by giving them a sense of acceptance in the business.
Recipients for the Malcolm Baldridge Award
The following are the recipients of the Malcolm Baldridge Award from 1988 to 2010.
Table 1. Malcolm Baldridge award recipients
Business Contributions of Malcolm Baldridge Award Winners
The Malcolm Baldridge Award has been in place for 29 years, and 118 recipients have won the award. At first, the program was taken to motivate firms to improve in all sectors of their operation. However, the program has produced uncountable returns on the companies’ investments. According to one study published in 2011, the payoff for the total expenditure to run the Baldrige Quality Assurance Program net gain is 820:1. Greater efficiency reduced wastage of funds; more employment opportunities, increased worker happiness, and income development are some of the examples of the business contribution of the award. Other surveys in education and infrastructure have shown that Baldrige-based businesses surpass their non-Baldrige counterpart firms in practically all essential variables, including the cost of care, affordability of care, faults, issues, and rates of death in the public healthcare area. Rates of graduation climb, dropout rates fall, and academic achievement on various indicators improve as firms use the Baldrige Framework to mature.
The Malcolm Baldridge winners have significantly contributed to the business sector. This is because the Malcolm Baldridge award has boosted the morale of both the small companies and big companies, resulting in increased productivity of the companies. The award sells the reputation of the businesses making many people believe in the quality of the product produced by companies. For example, in 2010, Nestle Purina pet care won the award. The award ranked nestle products as ranked number one in the market, especially in the pet food products category. Nestle Purina company became popular amongst many people both locally and internationally. Many people became familiar with the company’s products and this resulted in increased consumption of the Nestle Purina products. The direct result of this is that the net revenue of the company increased tremendously.
The prize is particularly significant because it developed a set of universally accepted criteria to assist organizations in implementing an influential culture of continuous improvement. Companies who want to receive the award must understand the particular standards required for building a successful quality policy and high levels of customer satisfaction. The seven criteria are governance, commentary, research, defined strategic development, personnel resource management, quality standards of services and goods, improved performance, and customer happiness. Mechanisms that lead to better quality management must be implemented in any area.
With the introduction of an Information Security program and the new Clusters of a Success project, Baldrige has demonstrated its significance and willingness to cope with current needs once again. The Baldrige Project and Association collaborated with the corporate sector to improve and promote the Baldrige Information security Performance Builder, a security tool (Abasiattai & Ahmed, 2020). This new tool uses the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to assist firms in self-evaluating their cyberspace infrastructure and resources to identify holes and increase their security measures across the board. The ultimate goal is to create a complete security Framework, train inspectors using a situational analysis, monitor progress, and honor ideal operations performance at an annual conference.
The Baldrige approach is applied to indigenous governments as part of the Villages of Achievement 2026 initiative. The Societies of Success Criteria is a systematic strategy for local activists, citizens, and cooperative allies to improve the efficacy of their efforts to promote healthy and productive inhabitants and safe neighborhoods. Communities may accomplish more significant results faster by using this paradigm in the areas that matter most: educational achievement, community well-being, insurance status, and safety.
The submission procedure and earning the award both benefit award winners. Many honor recipients say they acquired new consumers due to the honor, clients they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. They experience increased quality, attract comparative partners, receive national and international recognition, boost personal and organizational development, and improve internal motivation, among other things (Sulianny et al., 2019). On the other hand, receiving the prize does not ensure higher profitability, which depends on various circumstances.
The Baldrige Corporation obtains its overall value from three major areas. The first and most visible are the exact workflow and quality changes that firms using the Baldrige Framework have seen. BPEP has gathered data from Baldrige Prize recipients over the centuries, and their achievements are noteworthy (Oluwatobi et al., 2018). According to the Credit agencies of Econometric Analysis and Workers Statistics, agencies that have earned the Baldrige Honors have seen a staggering 92.6 percent rise in mean total sales revenue since gaining the honors; 2.5% employment creation, nearly 20 times higher than related industries; and an 84 percent rise in the number of business sites.
Conclusion
In conclusion, after thoroughly reviewing the five past MBNQA factory class winners, it is clear to discern numerous common points that led to both each existing employee operation and its long-term growth. Each of the companies had significant financial development in the time leading up to the next award and in the following years. These five corporations have laid out a road map or model for other businesses to follow. Even while the path may seem long and winding to the untrained eye, there are other methods to benefit from the Baldrige initiative without jumping in headfirst. Companies could start by conducting a conscience using the “Baldrige” criteria.
References
Abasiattai, I., & Ahmed, S. (2020). Case study of the application of the Malcolm Baldrige criteria to improve the quality performance of a completions workshop. Performance Improvement, 59(10), 30-53.
Balunová, Z. (2017). Credibility and building a good corporate reputation. Scientific Papers of the Silesian University of Technology. Organization and Management Series, 2017(110), 7-12.
Ma, B. (2017). Progress towards malaria elimination in India: achievements till now & way forward. Epidemiology International, 02(03), 1-3. Web.
Oluwatobi, S., Oshokoya, D., Atayero, A., Oludayo, O., Nsofor, C., & Oyebode, A. (2018). Students’ participation in Hult Prize and their decision for entrepreneurship: Data gathered from Hult Prize 2018 regional finals in Nigeria. Data in Brief, 19, 693-699.
Sulianny, E., Husein, W., & Subagja, D. (2019). The role of organizational development and organizational commitment on business performance SMEs with business motivation as variable mediation in the environmental development partnership program: A case study of small business partners fostered community development center PT. International Journal of Humanities and Applied Social Science, 4(111), 14-26.