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This chapter presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes actionable the ideas of Lewin and systems theorists. Its features are three organizational outcomes that must be achieved simultaneously, features of the system that must be targeted for change, six silent barriers to change, a governance system for continuous learning, change in large complex systems, and elements of a system that needed to immunize it against ultimate destruction.

High-reliability performance and high-hazard are intertwined in High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) operations; these organizations are highly safe, highly hazardous and highly significant for the modern society, not only for the valuable resources they have, but also the indispensable services they provide. This research intend to understand how HROs could produce high quality performance despite their challenging and demanding contexts. The research followed an emic approach to develop an organizational framework that reflects the contribution of the seeming traits of the organizations to the operations safety based on the workers point of views about the safety of workstations.

This research adopted mixed methods of in-depth interviews and literature review to identify the structural characteristics of high-reliability organizations (HROs) embedded in the organizations studies and developed a theoretical based structural framework for HROs. Furthermore, a systemic literature review was adopted to find the evidence from the organizations literature for the identified characteristics from the interviews from the first stage. The setting for this study is six Chinese power stations, four stations in Hubei province central China and two stations in the southern China Guangdong province.

The organizational framework is a key determinant to achieve high-reliability performance; however, solely it cannot explain how HROs manage the risks of hazard events and operate safely in high-hazard environments. High-reliability performance is attributed to the interaction between two sets of determinants of safety and hazard. The findings of this research indicate that HROs systems would be described as reliable or hazardous depending on the tightly coupled setting, complexity, bureaucracy involvement and dynamicity within the systems from one hand, and safety orientation, failure intolerance, systemwide processing, the institutional setting and the employment of redundant systems on other hand.

The authors developed an organizational framework of organizing the safety work in HROs. The applied method of interviewing and literature review was not adopted in any other researches.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether there is a difference with the exhibition of voluntary workplace behaviors (i.e. organizational citizenship behaviors [OCB] and counterproductive workplace behaviors [CWB]) among employees of high and low-performing banks in Ghana.

The quantitative approach was adopted to collect data from employees of selected banks from Ghana’s Club 100. The independent t-test was used to categorize the exhibition of employees’ OCB and counterproductive workplace behaviors by the type bank (i.e. high- or low-performing banks).

Contrary to the speculations of the study, employees of high-performing banks did not score higher in the exhibition of OCB compared to low-performing banks. Employees of low-performing banks were also not found to score higher with respect to CWB as compared to those of high-performing banks.

The research adopted a single rating method of collecting data from respondents. There could, however, be a level of biasness from the employees’ point of view of their exhibition of both OCB and CWB. Future research should thus seek to use a dyad method of collating data from both managers and employees of employees’ voluntary workplace behaviors. The study only focused on OCB as having a positive impact on the performance of banks and CWB having a negative impact. Future studies could also peruse both positive and negative impacts of OCB and CWB on the performance of organizations. An assessment of the various dimensions of both OCB and CWB (e.g. OCB-I, OCB-O, CWB-I and CWB-O) and their distinctive impacts on organizational performance is also suggested. Moreover, the adoption of only the quantitative approach to measuring the variables under the study was also identified as a limitation. This made it difficult to further peruse the intentions of employees to either engage in OCB or CWB. Further research could adopt the mixed-method approach that will add to the rigor in terms of the analyses. Researchers could also explore the same relationship among other sectors such as manufacturing. Further studies should also be conducted to peruse what promotes or inhibits the performance of banks irrespective of the voluntary workplace behaviors of the employees. More so, further research could also assess whether the workload of employees can predict employees’ voluntary workplace behaviors. Specific to the banking sector and others with the same working environment, future studies can investigate the factors that inhibit and encourage employees’ exhibition of OCB and CWB.

It was thus concluded that even though voluntary behaviors of employees influence the performance of organizations particularly banks, their effect is not that significant. This could be as a result of the tight schedules, structured and controlled nature of work activities in the banks that make employees so occupied throughout their working day to the extent they have perhaps no time to engage in extra-role activities. This calls for the need for banks to further explore other opportunities that contribute to boosting employee performance.

The study provides an in-depth account on whether OCB and CWB of employees predict the performance of organizations, especially banks in Ghana.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

In the knowledge‐based environment business firms face today, “high performance” organization is in popular demand. This paper aims to identify dimensions of organizational culture that are relevant in creating and maintaining a high performance organization within and across cultures.

The hypotheses are tested using the 62‐society Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness data on organizational and societal cultures. The impact of uncertainty avoidance, future orientation, power distance, gender egalitarianism, and humane orientation values and practices, at the organizational and societal level, is evaluated using hierarchical linear model methodology.

Several strategic facets may help develop high performing organizations. First, invest in the societies where such organizations are common. Second, invest in the societies that have uncertainty absorbing technological infrastructure and that are culturally sensitive (humane oriented). Third, invest in one or more of the five techniques that support the practice of high performing organizations. Fourth, invest in the societal contexts that value gender diversity, as they are more likely to value a shift towards high performing organizations. Fifth, invest in forming alliances with the organizations that value gender diversity, future‐oriented workforce strategies, and uncertainty absorbing technological infrastructure, as they are more likely to positively reinforce partner efforts to become high performing.

A multi‐faceted (five strategic facets), multi‐dimensional (five cultural techniques), and multi‐level (organizational and societal) approach to the development of high performing systems will help organizations foster and sustain an open culture, where cultural sensitivities are addressable through a climate of exchange and mutual give and take.

The paper uses a cross‐cultural database to identify the cultural dimensions of high performance organizational design.

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

To provide a framework for how to conceptualize and create high‐performance environments (HPEs).

The article concentrates on four key factors in the quest to establish an HPE: defining high performance; leading high performance; enabling high performance; and delivering high performance.

Highlights, as important indicators of an HPE: clarity around the performance that is expected; multi‐level performance expectations that emphasize both quantity and quality in delivery; clarity around who is responsible for delivering the different aspects of the multi‐level performance; constructive challenge that induces a pressure to perform that people can thrive on; high levels of support in pursuit of delivering against the challenge; internal leadership capability that is strong at all levels of the organization; performance that is both effective and efficient, thus inducing a state of “flow” in the organization; high levels of awareness at all levels of the organization; and high performance beliefs, attitudes and behaviors among all members of the organization.

HPEs are easy to write about, but not so easy to create. The article provides some key pointers and indicators both for a leader's current focus and his or her eventual success.

The article will be of greatest value to leaders intent on delivering high performance in their organizations.

Prior studies on the interactive effects of performance evaluative style and budgetary participation on managers' budgetary performance have overlooked several important issues. First, the moderating effects of organisational commitment have largely been overlooked. Since managers, who are highly committed to their organisations, are likely to pursue their organizations' goals much more intensely than managers who are not committed to their organisations, the effects of performance evaluative style and budgetary participation on the budgetary performance of these two groups of managers are likely to differ. Second, prior studies in this research area have concentrated mainly on the manufacturing sector. The services sectors have received relatively little attention. Third, differences between privately owned service organisations and publicly funded service organisations and their effects on performance have also not been considered. To address these gaps in the literature, this study investigates the three‐way interaction between reliance on financial measures for performance evaluation, budgetary participation and organisational commitment affecting budgetary performance in the health services sector. Based on a sample of 170 managers, the results indicate that highly committed managers react very differently to reliance on financial measures for performance evaluation and budgetary participation from lowly committed managers. Differences were also found between managers from the privately funded service organisations and those from the publicly funded service organisations.

Scanning both the academic and popular business literature of the last 40 years puzzles the alert reader. The variety of prescriptions of how to be successful (effective, performing, etc.) 1 Organizational performance, organizational success and organizational effectiveness will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.1 in business is hardly comprehensible: “Being close to the customer,” Total Quality Management, corporate social responsibility, shareholder value maximization, efficient consumer response, management reward systems or employee involvement programs are but a few of the slogans introduced as means to increase organizational effectiveness. Management scholars have made little effort to integrate the various performance-enhancing strategies or to assess them in an orderly manner.

This study classifies organizational strategies by the importance each strategy attaches to different constituencies in the firm’s environment. A number of researchers divide an organization’s environment into various constituency groups and argue that these groups constitute – as providers and recipients of resources – the basis for organizational survival and well-being. Some theoretical schools argue for the foremost importance of responsiveness to certain constituencies while stakeholder theory calls for a – situation-contingent – balance in these responsiveness levels. Given that maximum responsiveness levels to different groups may be limited by an organization’s resource endowment or even counterbalanced, the need exists for a concurrent assessment of these competing claims by jointly evaluating the effect of the respective behaviors towards constituencies on performance. Thus, this study investigates the competing merits of implementing alternative business philosophies (e.g. balanced versus focused responsiveness to constituencies). Such a concurrent assessment provides a “critical test” of multiple, opposing theories rather than testing the merits of one theory (Carlsmith, Ellsworth & Aronson, 1976).

In the high tolerance level applied for this study (be among the top 80% of the industry) only a handful of organizations managed to sustain such a balanced strategy over the whole observation period. Continuously monitoring stakeholder demands and crafting suitable responsiveness strategies must therefore be a focus of successful business strategies. While such behavior may not be a sufficient explanation for organizational success, it certainly is a necessary one.

Addresses the standardization of the measurements and the labels for concepts commonly used in the study of work organizations. As a reference handbook and research tool, seeks to improve measurement in the study of work organizations and to facilitate the teaching of introductory courses in this subject. Focuses solely on work organizations, that is, social systems in which members work for money. Defines measurement and distinguishes four levels: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio. Selects specific measures on the basis of quality, diversity, simplicity and availability and evaluates each measure for its validity and reliability. Employs a set of 38 concepts ‐ ranging from “absenteeism” to “turnover” as the handbook’s frame of reference. Concludes by reviewing organizational measurement over the past 30 years and recommending future measurement reseach.