| Summary: | There has been increasing concern about the lack of adherence to total quality management principles among public and private sector organisations who espouse a quality orientation. One example is the British police service. While it's new appraisal system (adopted nationally in 2004) has much to commend it, little can be regarded as quality compliant. The problem is its traditional outlook. Quality systems are focused on team-working with the assumption that processes, not people are the problem. The new police appraisal makes no such assumption retaining an emphasis on the individual as the major determinant of organisational performance. It is this contrast which focuses the present research not only concerning issues of performance assessment and appraisal but also diagnosis. It introduces the theory of planned behaviour as a remedy which incorporates organisation culture/climate, simultaneously, as indirect beliefs. It uses familiarity assessments to overcome increasing concerns about traditional elicitation processes. This produces the first research question: To what extent will integrating organisation culture/climate as indirect (top down) beliefs in the theory of planned behaviour provide a legitimate model for intervention and change in quality organisations? It also raises concerns about the theory's prediction of behaviour in circumstances of an annual appraisal and produces the second research question: To what extent will expanding the adapted theory of planned behaviour to include measures of performance self awareness (past behaviour, current expected behaviour and negative affectivity) provide a more legitimate model for intervention and change in quality organisations? Both these questions are addressed from a critical realist perspective, focused on the repeated self report returns of 325 personnel from a single English constabulary, conducted over two years. Aggregated to the group mean these measures provide evidence of bottom-up emergent processes analysed using structural equation modelling. Results support first the adapted theory of planned behaviour as a solid foundation for further development, and second its expansion as a legitimate model for intervention and change in quality organisations. Overall, the research provides for the quantitative improvement of British police service performance management and appraisal procedures, also relevant to other quality organisations. It also produces a number of theoretical, methodological and applied/ practitioner implications which are discussed together with study limitations.
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