Impacts of Planned Quality Change in Physical Workplace on Employees’ Behavior: A Quasi-experiment with Measurement Invariance and Propensity Score Matching

The literature has long suggested that the prime objective of planned change is to establish desired employee behavior. However, whether planned change in operations can lead to behavioral change is hitherto ambiguous in the literature. This study bridges this knowledge gap by examining a planned change in physical workplace: 5S, which is a Japanese housekeeping program, via a quasi-experiment. We perceive 5S as a change intervention aimed at regulating the physical workplace and nurturing employee behavior. We examine the difference in perceived self-discipline between 99 pairs of operators from a treatment group and a control group formed by propensity score matching (PSM). After controlling two organizational support factors, the result of the quasi-experiment reveals that the increase in perceived self-discipline of the treatment group is significantly larger than that of the control group. It implies that the employees' self-discipline highly likely increases when the employees involve in implementing 5S. This study sets the stage for advancing planned operational change, quality management and 5S research by developing a formal measurement instrument for 5S to bolster this line of research. It also opens a new avenue for empirical research of operations management to revisit those theories that were developed based on cross-sectional surveys.