Examining Flexibility in Small Business

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1- Preliminary arrangements

Progressively and for the sake of qualifying the proposed P-E's gap measurement context, the paper endorsed a number of acknowledged scholar techniques. The objective was to farm those techniques in order to spell out an acceptable managerial instrument, and to anticipate the concept of flexibility.

a) Questionnaire /constructs development

For developing a questionnaire, exploratory research is needed to investigate the likely determinants or attributes to be considered. Personal or focus interviews with the service users would be recommended. And for defining the scale attributes, a manager can capitalize on the previous empirical works cited in literature that are relevant to his or her own service sector. On the other hand, taking on Delphi technique would refine the multiitems questionnaire along the subscales (factors) underlined. Additionally, carrying out a pilot study would help fine-tuning the final script of the scale. However, the above approaches deduced from the works of Lam, Zhang and Jensen (2005). Alternatively, Walk –Thru- Audit practice of Fitzsimmons and Maurer (1991), cited in Olorunniwo and Pennington and Hsu (2002) could also be applied to develop a questionnaire. In their method a third party is getting familiar with the blueprint of a service sequential before experiencing the service itself, and he or she then proceeds into the walk-Thru- Audit while developing his or her own chronological questions; however, these questions are finally phrased to build the statements which are grouped into different dimensions.

b)Rating Scale development

Departing from the use of Likert scale which attaches numerical descriptors to different verbally described categories, and...

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...e grand mean, , which is the average of the four samples’ means.

c) Calculate the mean of the sample ranges, . However it is important to establish R chart to detect changes in variability over time since X-bar chart is founded on the hypothesis that process variability is constant over time (Pitt, 1994; cited in Orme and Cox, 2001); see worksheet 3 for establishing R chart.

d) Finally, -chart is constructed according to the following formulas which define the upper and lower control limits:

(1) UCL = + A2

(2) LCL= - A2

For a sample size n= 5, A2 = 0.577(the constant A2 is tabulated for various sample sizes and normally found in most statistics texts).

g) Manually ,or by Excel, or by any other sophisticated statistical software the graphical presentation of - chart can be developed (see Triola 2004:732 on how to produce the X-bar chart by Excel).

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