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Profiles the winners of the 1989 US Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Outlines the background to the award. Reports how Milliken & Company and Xerox Corporation Business Products and Systems, reflect the renewed commitment of American Business to quality improvement. Concludes by reporting how America’s renewed goal of providing high‐quality, world‐class goods and services will make the country competitive and help it to gain its share of markets.

As European division managing director of Milliken, Clive Jeanes was at the forefront of the industrial fabric maker's development of quality management for 22 years until his retirement in 1995. He led Milliken Europe to the European Quality Award (EQA) in 1993, four years after its US parent had been presented with a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

Over the past decades, growing interest in the behaviour of boards of directors has brought forth empirical studies on actual board behaviour. An important stream within this research followed the model proposed by Forbes and Milliken in 1999 in which the board processes, effort norms, cognitive conflict and the use of knowledge, are hypothesized to influence the performance of boards of directors. This paper aims to take stock of the results from this stream of research. The sometimes inconsistent results, and assumed methodological flaws of this research, leave open the question whether it makes sense to continue with this line of research.

Through a research synthesis of 17 primary studies on (parts of) the model proposed by Forbes and Milliken (1999), this question is addressed directly by clarifying what is known from the research done so far and by identifying possible distorting methodological moderators.

Strong empirical support is found for the effect of effort norms and the use of knowledge and skills on board task performance. The evidence for cognitive conflicts however was found to be inconclusive. Common method and respondent bias seem to be a lesser concern than often stated.

Future studies should not only look closely at the construct validity of conflict, but should also have to account for the multidimensionality of conflicts and the interdependency and endogeneity in the relationship between behaviour and performance in boards.

This is the first paper that systematically integrates and reviews the empirical results of the research following the Forbes and Milliken model and sketches roads for future research on board behaviour.

Explains how companies such as Milliken, have turned their minds to quality. Discusses how the inability to change basic assumptions guiding a company, helps explain why so many quality initiatives fail. Asserts the mindset challenge is to shift the focus of change from the manipulation of systems and structures to seeing the world from the customer′s perspective, and implementing programmes to meet these new requirements. Describes one organization that is meeting the challenge and how the company has changed. Concludes that everyone working for the company understands that their success in business depends on totally satisfying the customers.

Examines the commitment of Milliken Contract Carpets in the United Kingdom to improve the quality of product and service as perceived by the customer. Describes the background to the adoption of TQM by the parent company, which has defined its approach as “pursuit of excellence”, and which constantly strives to improve quality by benchmarking competitors and by Training managers. Reports on its uses of process improvement teams, customer action teams and supplier action teams which work together to improve quality throughout the organization.

This paper seeks to examine the current debate regarding the role of a board director.

A comprehensive review of the corporate governance (CG) literature is undertaken, with a particular focus on director contribution to board effectiveness.

The literature review revealed a number of issues in the CG literature that highlight the need to clarify board director role and pay closer attention to the processes needed for directors to perform their role effectively. These issues have broadly been classified into: conceptual issues regarding board effectiveness and director contribution; a methodological issue of level of analysis (board as a group and a director as individual); failure of much of the literature to account for the external context in which the board directors operate; and prescriptive nature of the literature.

Issues pertinent to the CG literature identified in this paper hold theoretical and practical implications.

The aim of this paper is to move toward a holistic model of organizational interpretation under uncertainty. This paper makes a series of novel conceptual propositions regarding the associations between state, effect and response uncertainty and the organizational interpretation process.

This conceptual paper extends existing conceptual work by distinguishing between general and issue-specific scanning and linking the interpretation process to three different types of perceived uncertainty: state, effect and response uncertainty.

It is proposed that environmental scanning leads to lower state and effect uncertainty, i.e. less uncertainty regarding the estimation of probabilities of events occurring in the external environment of the organization and of their consequences. It is further proposed that scanning leads to higher levels of perceived control over events and that the actual interpretation of events, in opportunity/threat terms, drives irregular issue-specific scanning and organizational reactions to such events.

The paper suggests a way to test links between organizational interpretation and uncertainty that might help explain and untangle some of the conflicting empirical results found in the extant literature. The paper illustrates how the literature could benefit from re-conceptualizing the perceived environmental uncertainty construct to take into account different types of uncertainty.

For practitioners, this paper emphasizes the importance of environmental scanning and how scanning practices can lead to general alertness, to more positive event interpretations and how interpretations form responses to opportunities in the environment.

This paper extends on existing work by linking the interpretation process to three different types of uncertainty (state, effect and response uncertainty) with several novel and testable propositions. The paper also differentiates clearly general (regular) scanning from issue-specific (irregular) scanning. Finally, the paper provides a unifying view, piecing together in one picture elements that have so far been dispersed in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating role of silence as a link between punishment, communication opportunities and stress.

The authors conducted a survey among 1,015 highly skilled employees of South Korean companies using a self-administered instrument. In total, 748 questionnaires were received from the 1,015 participants. Of these, 61 questionnaires were incomplete and were discarded; the remaining 687 questionnaires were used in the analysis.

The results revealed that punishment and communication opportunities are significantly associated with silence. Silence showed a positive relationship with stress, and it mediates the relationship between punishment and stress. Meanwhile, findings indicate that silence does not mediate the link between communication opportunities and stress.

This study investigates the unitary construct of silence. Therefore, the authors suggest future researchers examine the other forms of silence such as multidimensional construct of silence that focuses on the motives of individuals to be silent.

The study highlights the importance of establishing organizational ombudsman system, grievance procedures and employee management meetings to mitigate silence behavior. Moreover, the authors recommended management demonstrates their interest in shared information to avoid employee silence.

This study is the first to explore the mediating role of silence on the relationship between punishment and stress.

Describes how Milliken embarked on its pursuit of excellence in customer satisfaction. Its main means of doing this is by an annual customer survey carried out by an independent firm of consultants. Outlines the lessons learned since these surveys were started in 1985. This includes the importance both of internal customer‐supplier relationships and of relationships with external suppliers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of age in work teams on short‐term team consequences, such as satisfaction, involvement, mutual learning, decision making and feedback, and long‐term team consequences, such as quality, sick leave and burnout, and to consider their implications for team management and human resource management (HRM) policies in team‐based organizations facing an ageing work force.

The study elaborates on the framework of Milliken and Martins, further examining the effects of both average age and age differences. The authors collected objective data as well as data through questionnaires among 150 work teams with more than 1,500 white‐collar and blue‐collar workers from an automotive company in Sweden. With these data the authors conducted correlation and step‐by‐step hierarchical regression analyses.

The analyses showed significant positive effects of average age on both short‐term and long‐term consequences. No significant effects of age differences were found.

Conducting a longitudinal study in an automotive company in Sweden resulted in monocultural findings. The use of a sample from one organization may limit the generalization of our findings. Future research should pay more attention to effects of age in teams, compared to individual age effects in organizations and to explore more advanced models that help to understand the dynamic processes of age in teams.

The results have implications for management of teams and HRM policy in organizations relating to recruitment, early retirement, training developments and team composition in general.

The paper suggests positive effects of age in work teams and contributes to the literature about the ageing workforce working in teams.