André de Waal

HPO Center, the Netherlands

The construction industry is a significant contributor to the economic development and performance of many countries. At the same time, this industry has long suffered from low productivity, poor project outcomes and disappointing results. The construction industry is therefore in need of a quality upgrade of construction companies so they will be...

The research objective of this research is to theoretically identify the capabilities organizations need to have to create and sustain social value. We focus on multinational enterprises as this type of organization has much influence worldwide and in local communities. We use the High-Performance Organisation (HPO) Framework in our research as it...

It is generally accepted that small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) have room for improvement from a high-performance perspective. However, research concerning the use of High-Performance Organisation (HPO) frameworks for South African SMEs is wanting. The purpose of this study is to explore the applicability of the scientifically validated de...

An increasing number of organizations embark on a journey to transform themselves into a high-performance organization (HPO) to be able to better deal with the changes in their environment. Unfortunately, in the current literature hardly any approaches are described that can support them during this transformation. One promising approach, the (Waal...

The war for talent has returned after the Covid pandemic. One way for organizations to win this war is by becoming more attractive than other organizations on the labor market. Previous research has shown that by becoming a high performance organization (HPO), an organization will be seen as ‘a winning team’ for which people like to work. This rese...

Purpose Private telecommunication companies in Yemen face huge challenges to improve their competitive position. Many of them suffer from performance management systems (PMS) that are not aligned nor integrated and do not give adequate support. This research aims at identifying the current state and quality of PMS in Yemeni private telecom companie...

Purpose In the past decades, there has been much research into ways organizations can become high-performing. Research into ways organizations can stay high-performing, especially in challenging times, is much less prevalent. The purpose of this study is to look at ways that high-performance organizations (HPOs) use in practice to stay high-perform...

Despite many attempts to improve the performance of public sector organizations, in developing countries many such organizations are still underperforming. This study evaluates the impact of organizational structure and culture on the performance of Uganda’s High Court by applying the high-performance organizations (HPO) framework. A questionnaire...

This research investigates the question ‘How can a finance function get approval and resources for an improvement that is mainly internally oriented (within the finance function) and where the benefits will mainly be indirect in nature?’ For the finance function to make the improvements necessary to provide a high-quality service to its customers a...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to answer the research question “Is the high-performance organization (HPO) Framework suitable for non-governmental private sector organizations, specifically the affiliates of international companies operating in the ICT sector in Egypt?” Design/methodology/approach The research concerns a replication study in...

This paper investigates the question: How should a finance function deal with megatrends and disruptors in such a way that it can secure its sustainable performance? The existing literature contains little information on how to make the finance function ‘future-ready’ so that it can deal with its changing environment. Such changes consist mainly of...

The COVID-19 caught many organisations off guard. The same is true for the academic ‘future of work’ literature, which hardly pays any attention to a disruptor like a pandemic. In the past months a catching up in the academic and especially the professional literature regarding COVID-19 could be noticed. However, this literature does not describe t...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to arrive at a general definition of an HPO and a (practical) way to measure an HPO. Managers are looking for techniques to strengthen their organizations in a way that they cannot only cope with threats but could also quickly take advantage of opportunities, and thus, grow and thrive. The academic and especiall...

Malta’s introduction into the EU increased the competition in the country considerably and local companies as well as foreign subsidiaries have been forced to keep up with international quality standards in operations and human resources, with mixed results. As a consequence, Maltese organisations have been looking for a holistic improvement techni...

Sub-standard infrastructure is one of the most significant challenges for economic development in East Africa. Specifically, the availability of affordable, locally produced cement is critical to infrastructural and economic development and job creation in the region. Thus, it is critical for cement companies to achieve better operational and finan...

The coming decades are expected to be extremely challenging for organizations. On the one hand, there are the United Nations Sustainable Development goals to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone. On the other hand, organizations are expected to have to deal with an increasing number of megatrends and disru...

The future of work is one of the most crucial platforms currently for business leaders as organizations have to prepare themselves to adequately deal with megatrends and disruptors in their technical and physical environments. At the same time, megatrends and disruptors can present both business opportunities and threats. The research question this...

Purpose One of the most important factors for the success of an organization is the quality of its managers. However, this is a rather general statement, because there are many different types of managers with different work styles. This begs the question: are all types of managers, regardless of their work styles, important to organizational succe...

In recent decades the Asian continent has gained in economic importance. This advancement has not been without its problems. Therefore, in order to stay competitive, Asian companies need to transform themselves into high-performance organizations (HPO). This means that they need to know the factors that will make them world-class. This paper descri...

Over the past decades, the financial industry has been affected by sustained liberalization and synchronization of the financial markets as well as new developments in information technology. This caused the banking industry in emerging markets to become more competitive due to increased bank sizes caused by acquisitions and mergers while they did...

Purpose Happiness at work (HAW) has been a hot item in both the academic and managerial literature, as HAW seems to have a positive effect on attractiveness of an organization on its current workforce and potential new employees. Many of the HAW models have been developed in a Western setting, while this research aims at evaluation of whether a pre...

The continuing quest of Indian companies to become leading in the region leads to two research questions: (1) How high performing are Indian organizations currently, compared to other Asian organizations? and (2) What do Indian organizations need to focus on to become truly world-class? We investigate the answers on these two questions using the Hi...

Purpose Stakeholder management is often primarily seen as maintaining external relations. However, it also has specific consequences for the internal processes of an organization and the behavior of its people. The authors argue that an organization that is meeting the standards of the high-performance organization (HPO) is able to effectively main...

One of the most important staff units in an organization is the finance function, as this function maintains the relations with all parts of the organization and operates at a management team level. Therefore, this function needs to transform itself into a high-performance finance function (HPFF). Unfortunately, finance functions encounter many bar...

Purpose Non-performance should be addressed urgently given the high associated costs: on average, 17 percent of management time is spent overseeing non-performing employees, thus distracting managers from important business issues and initiatives and, non-performers can reduce productivity by as much as 30–40 percent. Though many organizations reco...

Purpose Ever since Portugal joined the European Union, Portuguese organisations have been struggling with both the challenges of new competitors flooding in from other European countries and taking advantage of the opportunities the new enlarged integrated market offered them. This is because Portuguese companies have in general low average rates o...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a previously developed framework for creating so-called high performance partnerships (HPPs), which yields a competitive advantage for all firms in the partnership, in the Asian context. Design/methodology/approach The HPP framework is evaluated for a Philippine organization that produces, markets...

Purpose The concept of the high-performance organization (HPO) receives much attention nowadays. To create and sustain an HPO, all parts of the organization must contribute, especially the finance function, whose relations with every part of the organization mean that it can be regarded as the spider in the organizational web. The paper aims to di...

Purpose When an organization becomes a high performance organization (HPO), it is able to outperform comparable organizations for an extended period of time, thereby ensuring its long-term survival. It is therefore imperative for these organizations embarking on an HPO transformation to be aware of the factors that will help make this transformatio...

This paper extends Schama’s (1988) notion of moral geography where there is a determinacy link between an ecology and those managing organisations within it. We emphasise that the link is framed by its historical legacy of social ideals. This paper hypothesises that the egalitarian influence of the polder philosophy leads Dutch managers to value co...

The dual challenge of globalisation of competition and global economic slowdown has increasingly forced businesses to do introspection not only in terms of their cost structures, but also in terms of their value proposition in search of sustainable organisational success. Given the limited influence that organisations, in general, have over their e...

Purpose Many models for designing a high-performance organization (HPO) have been proposed in the past decades. However, not much information can be found in the extant literature on whether these models actually improve the results of an organization over time in a sustainable manner. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether de Waal’s (201...

Purpose Happiness at work (HAW) is receiving much attention in the literature, as HAW seems to have a positive effect on organisational performance, such as in increase of productivity, lower turnover of employees and less customer complaints. There is however no research into the relation between HAW and the attractiveness of an organisation. It...

Purpose Islamic finance is an interesting field of research, as it represents an alternative to conventional finance for Muslims. It is a way of conducting finance based on the principles of Islam and prohibition of interest. Islamic finance can be divided into two areas: Islamic banking and Islamic insurance (Takaful). This paper aims to describe...

Many of the publications on achieving high performance have been written by North American researchers and consultants, and the case companies they described originate mainly from the United States. However, there is a lack of long-term studies that subject the described techniques to rigorous evidence-based management research in North American co...

Purpose Many businesses in the world are family-owned. A family-owned business differs from other types of businesses in several ways, because it is composed of both a family and a business. A recurring question in management research has been: which type of business performs better, the family-owned or the non-family owned? An alternative questio...

Purpose Associations perform an important role in developing a profession, by organizing professionals into a community in which relevant information and knowledge are shared, ideas expanded, contacts with other like-minded professionals made, a code of ethics established and appropriate practices for members identified. For an association to be ef...

Purpose Nowadays, it is rare to find an organization that operates in isolation, without the need to partner with other organizations. Partnerships offer firms access to new technologies, markets, and knowledge. During the process of transforming into a high performance organization (HPO), an organization will eventually find itself operating with...

It is generally accepted that, to move the governmental sector toward better performance, governmental agencies need to adopt high-performance management techniques. One such technique is the HPO (high-performance organization) Framework, which has been applied successfully in many countries. However, most of these applications were in developed co...

Purpose The academic and management literature offers an abundance of techniques for helping organizations improve their performance. Generally, though, these techniques have not been subjected to rigorous, evidence-based evaluation or have been tested in practice over time. The purpose of this paper is to describe a longitudinal study into the ef...

Purpose The Dutch agricultural sector nowadays experiences many challenges. To deal with these, the sector has been interested in finding ways to improve performance. Mostly, the improvement research has concentrated in the areas of innovation of products and quality, supply chain management, cooperatives, entrepreneurship and human resources. Howe...

Purpose Managers are constantly seeking to create and implement new sources of competitive advantage and ways to achieve sustainable high performance to become a high performance organization (HPO) ¬– defined as an organization that achieves financial and non-financial results exceedingly better than those of its peer group over a period of five y...

Purpose There is a growing debate and research stream on the influence of national culture on the type and nature of management control systems (MCSs) used by organizations in the country. A specific case is the management control of projects executed in a multicultural international environment. The purpose of this paper is to describe the findin...

Purpose In recent years, China has shifted its competitive strategy from competing on low cost to producing higher value added products and services, and the country has made the promotion of business excellence a national strategic priority. As a consequence, Chinese organizations need to know the factors that will make them world-class companies....

Purpose An important question in contemporary research is: do certain management practices cause better performance or do better performing organizations find it easier to adopt certain management practices? This question is also of importance when applying the high performance organization (HPO) framework, which is a scientifically validated techn...

Purpose Many researchers argue that the shared values of a generation affect people’s attitude, commitment, and ethics toward work. It is also argued that generational differences may cause tension between employees and with that prevent projects – such as a transition to a high performance organization (HPO) – from being completed successfully. T...

Purpose The Dutch supermarket industry is dominated by a small number of powerful companies which capture the majority of sales and which compete fiercely with each other. This competition is mainly quality based, in the sense of offering increasingly more products of higher quality and striving for better distribution mechanisms. Interestingly the...

Purpose One of the most important characteristics of high-performance organizations is that these organizations always aim at servicing their customers as best as possible. In practice, this means that the employees of these organizations have to behave toward customers in such a way that these customers are not only fully satisfied but also become...

Purpose In recent years, the concept of the high-performance organization (HPO) has gained interest among organizations seeking to outperform their competitors and ensure business continuance. However, despite an increasing number of studies on high performance, the literature still does not present a clear organizational change approach with chang...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deal with the need for Egyptian ICT companies to adopt high performance practices in order to be able to contribute more to the development of Egypt. However, as not much research has been done into management practices which can support these organizations in the Egyptian context, a framework which was devel...

Purpose – Ever since the introduction of Investors in People (IiP), a management framework for high performance invented by the UK Government aimed at improving the UK’s industrial performance, there has been indistinctness about whether IiP actually improved organisational performance. The academic literature gives conflicting evidence and almost...

In an era of increasingly saturated markets and ever tightening competition, multinational firms are diversifying their product portfolios, exploring new areas of operation, standardizing to achieve economies of scale, and generally enhancing the quality of their organization. Such quality management practices, however, are typically confined to pr...

Purpose This paper aims to investigate whether the United Arab Emirates (UAE) business context as described in the literature still matches with the UAE business context in practice. In many managerial publications, and even in quite a few academic ones, warnings are given about the different and difficult business environment which exists in Arab...

In dit artikel wordt een onderzoek gepresenteerd naar de mate waarin franchise-supermarkten voldoen aan de vijf factoren van high performanceorganisaties (HPO): hoge kwaliteit managers, hoge kwaliteit medewerkers, openheid en actiegerichtheid, continue verbetering en vernieuwing, en langetermijngerichtheid. Daarbij wordt gebruik gemaakt van het HPO...

National cultures have a strong influence on the performance of organizations and should be taken into account when studying the traits of high performing managers. At the same time, many studies that focus upon the attributes of successful managers show that there are attributes that are similar for managers across countries. This article reports...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to explore the profile of an ideal employee, to be more precise the behavioral characteristics of the Dutch high-performing employee (HPE). Organizational performance depends for a large part on the commitment of employees. Employees provide their knowledge, skills, experiences and creativity to the organizati...

There is still a good deal of confusion in the literature about how the use of a performance management system affects overall organizational performance. Some researchers find that performance management enhances both the financial and non-financial results of an organization, while others do not find any positive effects or, at most, ambiguous ef...

Purpose – The importance of partnerships to organizational success has increased considerably the past decennia and many organizations strive at creating high-performance partnerships (HPPs). For this to happen, organizations in the partnerships have to be of high quality and their collaborations should be world-class. Whereas the factors that crea...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine whether there are common conceptions of high performance organizations (HPOs) among business in South Africa and Tanzania. This is important to know because their perceptions will not only influence the nature and scope of topics, syllabi and course materials used in teaching, but will also influe...

Realizing the need to improve its processes in order to better serve its customers and meet its financial goals, the leaders of the Customer Relations department at Ziggo, a Dutch provider of media and communications services, turned to the HPO framework, which outlines the characteristics of a high-performing organization, for guidance. Unlike oth...

Purpose – In the home furnishing industry outside contract installers produce higher quality work than in-house installers which is reflected in less revisits to customers to repair mistakes. Many home furnishing retailers are therefore contemplating introducing so that the quality of the work of in-house installers will be linked to financial ince...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to discuss the role of the employee in the high performance organization. One of the management techniques which has gained much popularity the past 15 years is the employee satisfaction survey. Many organizations, both profit and non-profit, use a yearly questionnaire, which measures the satisfaction of emp...

Over the past decades partnerships have become a pervasive element in studies on the organization of social and economic activities at both national and international levels. It is noteworthy that, notwithstanding the popularity of the concept as evidenced by the vast amount of articles on the topic, Barnes and Brown (2011) recently described partn...

Operating within a foreign trade zone in Dubai, biz-group has built a solid reputation as a provider of corporate training, team building, and strategic services for organizations throughout the United Arab Emirates. Driven by its motto, “Passionate about performance,” the company strives to engender cooperation among its diverse workforce through...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is evaluate whether the high performance organization (HPO) framework can satisfy the recent urgent request of Thai business leaders to create a unique organization which is better able to deal with unpredictable circumstances and increased competition. To establish the suitability of the HPO Framework it first h...

Purpose – The diamond industry used to be a stable sector. However, the market for diamonds is changing rapidly due various developments, putting margins in the entire diamond industry under severe pressure. Consequently diamond retailers have begun to search for new methods that could help them improve their performance. This paper aims to evaluat...

Purpose – Thai organizations are currently wrestling with the quality demands that are placed on them because of the approaching accession of Thailand into the ASEAN Economic Community. Thai managers are acutely aware that this will increase competitive pressures in their country, and are therefore looking for a technique which can help them create...

The Philippines is one of the world's leading exporters of bananas. The banana industry, however, is facing severe problems: crop diseases, increasing pressure to keep prices down while improving quality, and poor cooperation among industry partners. To effectively deal with industry-wide threats, there is an urgent need to increase the quality of...

Purpose ‐ Despite the fact that in recent years performance management and measurement (PMM) techniques and tools have attracted much research interest and that many scholars claim that implementing PMM yields many advantages, there is only a limited number of rigorous, systematic, scientific analysis of empirical studies into the benefits actually...

Purpose – The ongoing debate about the effects of bonuses on managers’ performance and the role of reward systems in organizations has still not led to a unanimous conclusion among academics and practitioners. Those in favor of bonuses state that applying bonuses and putting emphasis on monetary rewards increases productivity and organizational per...

Purpose At the end of 2007, the Journal of Management History published a special issue on the topic of excellence, titled Our Dreams of Excellence . In this issue, Guest Editor Dahlgaard‐Park stated that research into excellence had taken a high flight in recent years despite the fact that there was no unanimity yet about a definition of or the fa...

The purpose of the study was to establish the levels of high performance in financial institutions in Uganda. The paper uses a sample comprising 10 financial institutions. The extent of high performance was evaluated using the following high performance organization framework factors: management quality, workforce quality, long term orientation, co...

Ever since the financial scandals that rocked the business world and the worldwide financial crisis that followed, the debate on the effects of bonuses and the role of reward systems has divided academics and practitioners alike. On one side are the proponents of bonuses, who state that monetary rewards increase productivity and organizational perf...

The application of the high-performance organization (HPO) framework to a European multinational retailer operating in 15 countries showed that the framework is useful in accurately assessing progress in adopting the characteristics of a high-performing organization and in formulating improvement suggestions at various organizational levels. In a s...

Purpose Interest in creating high performance organizations (HPOs) has been growing in the Middle East and Middle Eastern managers have been looking into practices that will help them elevate organizational performance. Unfortunately there is a shortage of HPO studies conducted in the Middle East which could help these managers. The purpose of this...