Incremental innovation and management styles of group activities: An empirical study on tangible and intangible effects by quality control circle activities

This research analyzed conditions and processes of incremental innovation created by group activities, focusing on more than one hundred quality control circle (QCC) cases appearing in the Journal of QC Circle. Their tangible and intangible effects of QCCs were statistically analyzed based on the management style of QCC. The framework of the analysis is as follows: The factors for tangible effects were set the financial amounts or improvement rate, and the factors for intangible effects were set organizational capabilities developed by QCC. Regarding organizational capabilities were categorized into “motivation” skill, “human relations” skill and “knowledge and technical” skill according to existing studies. The conditions of management style were set following three aspects: (1) Group members´ promotion of self-directing activities for improvement, (2) differences of group members´ attributes and (3) effective support by managers. As results of quantitative analysis, the aspects on (1) and (2) had significant effects. Besides of these quantitative analyses, the cases with remarkable achievement on both tangible and intangible effects were focused on and case studies were done. Based on these analyses, several suggestions for management on group activities were proposed.