Workforce education forms one of the core aspects of organizational learning which aims for performance as well as efficiency. Learning is goal-oriented in business organizations. Organizations’ activities are highly-oriented towards customer satisfaction. Organizations learn from practice and delivery of services to meet consumer needs and necessities. Perfection, efficiency and smart practices define today’s multinational organizational culture. But how do the multinational organizations achieve such perfections in their business operations? This paper addresses this issue by linking teleological aspects of learning and practice to performance, adoption of routines, and learning-induced adaptation in order to explain how they achieve “perfection” in practice and operations. Further, the paper attempts to study a particular aspect of organizational (teleological perfectionism) process by modeling scenarios which define goaloriented organizational learning and adaptation, and underpins how such teleological processes effectively benefit organizations in the long run. Conclusions drawn up from an example being modeled in this paper suggest that teleology, or teleological dynamics play significant role in shaping today’s organizations and help explain some (or high) degree of perfectionism in their operations.

What are the fundamental factors essential for firms and organizations to achieve perfection in production and service deliveries? In other words, what are the dynamic factors that drive perfection in production and service delivery of a firm? The concept of lean production or lean management (Womack et al., 1990) is well-attributed in the manufacturing industries, particularly in Japan. For instance, concepts like Kaizen, Just-in-time have been widely discussed in the literature of management (see Golhar and Stamm, 1991). However, its (lean management’s) implementation in service organizations is only recently being studied (Hanna, 2007; and Damrath, 2012). In fact, there are as many factors that drive perfection in production and service management (Damrath, 2012), but some of the most important factors, according to us, are goal orientation, organizational routines, and workforce learning. Whereas goal orientation has teleological foundations (Cayla, 2008; and Bekmeier-Feuerhahn, 2009), routines confer stability to organizational operations (Feldman, 2000) and help develop capabilities in a dynamic sense (Zollo and Winter, 1999). In this paper, we concentrate our study on customer service quality and service quality management. That is, how organizations can aspire to attain perfectionism in service delivery to their customers. Flawless performance in organizational operations related to customer service is a much desired attribute, but difficult to achieve in practice. Good organizations aim for perfection in organizational operations related to excellence in customer services. In fact, Kolzow (2012) has stressed on the aspect of managing for excellence and outcome-based performance that ‘focus’ on the customer. Customers prefer organizations which are customer-centric and which excel in service quality management (Zeithaml et al., 1996). In effect, the concept about the origin of the philosophy of customer service could be traced back to Nordstrom (2001), who was among the first few to have helped to cultivate the organizational culture of customer service excellence. Nordstrom affirmed (Spector and McCarthy, 2005), “Do whatever it takes to take care of the customer.”

Knowledge Management Journal, Teleological Dynamics, Organizational Performance, Management By Objective (MBO), Goal Orientation, Goal Setting in Organization, Practice and Perfectionism.