Individual Differences in the Managerial Mental Representation of Business Processes

The main issue of business reengineering, as demanded by Hammer, is a specific orientation of management towards business processes. We will analyse the psychological implications. Up to now process orientation has not been a main issue of research in experimental cognitive psychology. Our basic research concerning individual cognitive differences has shown that stable preferences do exist for predicative versus functional cognitive structures. Predicative thinking emphasises the preference in thinking in terms of judgements and in terms of networks of relations and structures; functional thinking emphasises the preference of thinking in terms of effects, organising processes and sequences of actions. We are working together with managers in an ongoing research project. In several case studies we are trying to detect a correlation between a process orientation in the observable managerial behaviour, the beliefs of the managers and their individual preference for predicative versus functional mental models. 1. Cognitive aspects of business reengineering Hammer and Champy consider Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as a very powerful instrument. It is ...the fundamental radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed. (Hammer & Champy, 1993, p. 32). Nevertheless, it is reported (e. g. Bashein et al., 1994; Champy, 1995) that apart from the fact that the realisation of this idea is successful, there are a lot of difficulties and even failures. Business reengineering is successful but only to a certain degree. One of the important hints as to why difficulties could arise is given by Hammer and Champy themselves. Although this word (process) is the most important in our definition, it is also the one that gives most corporate managers the greatest difficulty. Most business people are not "processorientated"; they are focused on tasks, on jobs, on people, on structures, but not on processes. (ibid, 1993, p. 35) In their book Hammer and Champy try to construct a suitable mental model (Johnson-Laird, 1983) of the role which processes play in operating procedures in the reader’s mind. For this purpose they give historical examples. It is the method of presentation which induces the idea. For two hundred years people have founded and built companies around Adam Smith' s brilliant discovery that industrial work should be broken down into its simplest and most basic tasks. In the post-industrial business age we are now entering, corporations will be founded and built around the idea of reunifying those tasks into coherent business processes. (ibid, p. 2) The core message of our book, then, is this: It is no longer necessary or desirable for companies to organize their work around Adam Smith' s division of labor. Task-orientated jobs in today' s world of customers, competition, and change are obsolete. Instead, companies must organize work around process. (ibid, p. 27/28)