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The purpose of this study is to test the relationship between team composition and team performance by applying the construct of Ten Haaf, Bikker and Adriaanse.

Data were collected from a sample of 39 teams out of a population of 234 undergraduate MBA students. Four performance indices of each team were tested against the Ten Haaf et al. scores by using Spearman's rank test.

A statistical relation between team composition according to Ten Haaf et al. and team performance was not found. It is argued that Ten Haaf et al. and other authors do not use constructs according to Belbin's theory of balancing teams.

There is need for a construct, which is isomorphic with Belbin's notions of team balancing. The relation between this construct and performance should be tested.

The current team balancing constructs in literature are of limited use. As the various constructs give differing assessments of balance these constructs should not be used. Implications are suggested for more prescriptive algorithms for designing balanced teams.

The team composition algorithm of Ten Haaf et al. has not been tested up to now with regard to team performance. The study amplifies on the ambiguity of the concept of team balance.

In this article, the relationship is studied between certification on the ISO 9000 series and the performance of organizations. It is often claimed that ISO certification generates an improvement in the performance of organizations. This research aims to find out if ISO certification indeed results in better performance outcomes for organizations. This is of importance, for example, for those organizations that seek ISO certification in order to improve their performances. To test the hypothesis, an instrument is developed to measure the performance. The performance of organizations is operationalized through five performance indicators, which were derived from the literature: production process, company result, customer satisfaction, personnel motivation, and investment on means. Besides this main research interest the question is posed if other factors can explain for the performance. The concept of motivation is introduced which is the focus of the second part of the study.

The purpose of this article is to address ways in which customer satisfaction could be improved.

In this article it is shown how the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can be of use in making a choice between a number of alternative quality improvement projects. A case study performed in a large information technology oriented company illustrates that the model can play an important role in reaching a consensus about the ranking of quality management projects.

Results of the case study suggest that the AHP can strongly contribute to a more effective way of communicating and transforming knowledge between experts from different disciplines during quality improvement projects.

Based on this case study, it can be concluded that by means of the AHP model a rather simple method of making a decision regarding pilot projects related to quality improvement is available to companies. One final advantage of the AHP approach as experienced in the case study relates to the possibility to explore inconsistent judgements.

Discusses the organization of quality management from the perspective of control. First defines an abstract control system in terms of hierarchy. Then uses this model to describe the organization of quality management in more detail. Indicates how this abstract control system can be realized in a concrete situation. Aims at making a clear distinction between the hierarchy concept in terms of control and the usual hierarchy concept as it is being used in organizations.

That the introduction of the Control system should have given rise to a considerable amount of criticism, both appreciative and adverse, was naturally to be expected. The appreciative remarks which have appeared in the press, and those also which have been privately communicated to the directors, indicate that the subject has been intelligently considered, and in some cases carefully investigated and studied. The opinions given are worth having on account of the position and influence of hose who have given them, and on account of the obvious freedom from bias which has characterised them. This is so far satisfactory, and goes to show that the success which has attended the working of the Control system abroad may well be expected to attend it in this country as soon as it is sufficiently well known to be appreciated by the manufacturers and vendors of good and genuine products, and by the general public, whose best interests it cannot but serve.

The New Year will see Britain a member of the largest multi‐national free trade area in the world and there must be few who see it as anything less than the beginning of a new era, in trade, its trends, customs and usages and especially in the field of labour, relations, mobility, practices. Much can be foreseen but to some extent it is all very unpredictable. Optimists see it as a vast market of 250 millions, with a lot of money in their pockets, waiting for British exports; others, not quite so sure, fear the movement of trade may well be in reverse and if the increasing number of great articulated motor trucks, heavily laden with food and other goods, now spilling from the Channel ports into the roads of Kent are an indication, the last could well be true. They come from faraway places, not all in the European Economic Community; from Yugoslavia and Budapest, cities of the Rhineland, from Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Mulhouse and Milano. Kent has had its invasions before, with the Legions of Claudius and in 1940 when the battle roared through the Kentish skies. Hitherto quiet villagers are now in revolt against the pre‐juggernaut invasion; they, too, fear more will come with the enlarged EEC, thundering through their one‐street communities.

“Shared purpose,” understood as a widely shared commitment to the organization’s fundamental raison d’être, can be a powerful driver of organizational performance by providing both motivation and direction for members’ joint problem-solving efforts. So far, however, we understand little about the organization design that can support shared purpose in the context of large, complex business enterprises. Building on the work of Selznick and Weber, we argue that such contexts require a new organizational form, one that we call collaborative. The collaborative organizational form is grounded in Weber’s value-rational type of social action, but overcomes the scale limitations of the collegial form of organization that is conventionally associated with value-rational action. We identify four organizational principles that characterize this collaborative form and a range of managerial policies that can implement those principles.

Government appointed and sponsored committees of every description—select, ad hoc, advisory, inquiry—such a prominent feature of the public scene since the last War, are understandable, even acceptable, reflect the urgency of the times in which we live. In the gathering gloom of more recent twilight years, they have flourished inordinately, especially in the socio‐political field, where most of their researches have been conducted. Usually embellished with the name of the figure‐head chairman, almost always expensively financed, they have one thing in common—an enormous output of words, telling us much of what we already know. So much of it seems dull, meaningless jargon, reflecting attitudes rather than sound, general principles.

In several countries the period after World War II is characterized by building dwellings in mass production in order to bring the supply in line with the increasing housing demand. As a result little attention was paid to societal trends and actual user wants. Several trends and developments with respect to housing have been identified since then, which seem to make a more individualized approach to the development, design and building of dwellings and residential environments desirable. In such an approach a thorough understanding of the objectives and activities of inhabitants seems to be required. But how can we explore these objectives and activities? We lack a structured set of instruments that can be used by policy makers, architects, developers and builders to map out a detailed record of user wants. Although there are many methods for the elicitation of housing preferences these methods are not satisfactory for this purpose, because, among others, they focus on what people want and not on why they want it. In this paper I shall first describe the main characteristics of methods for measuring stated housing preferences. Subsequently, I will present an outline of a more user-oriented approach to the measurement of housing preferences. This approach is based on Gibson’s theory of affordances.