Ford, Robert C., Sivo, Stephen A., Fottler, Myron D., Dickson, Duncan, Bradley, Kenneth, Johnson, Lee
abstract
In today's competitive health care environment, service excellence is rapidly becoming a major differentiating advantage between healthcare providers. Too often, senior executives talk about theie 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 asses the extent to which an organisation's internal processes are aligned wit 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 factors analysis of the data revealed eight factors that predicted beneficial employee outcomes,such as organizational commitment and satisfaction with the job and organization.