Applicability of the high performance organization framework in the Middle East

Abstract

PurposeInterest 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 paper is to examine the applicability of the recently developed HPO Framework in a Middle Eastern context, namely at Palestine Polytechnic University (PPU). The goal of the study was to evaluate whether this framework could be applied in the Middle Eastern context and thus help improve performance of Middle Eastern organizations.Design/methodology/approachA workshop was conducted with management and staff of the university at PPU's premises in Hebron. During the workshop, management, staff and teachers filled in the HPO questionnaire, which gauges the current HPO status of an organization. The resulting HPO score of PPU, and the comparison with the scores of other Middle‐Eastern organizations in the database of the researchers, were discussed during a workshop with representatives of PPU and initial improvements were established and put down in an action plan.FindingsWith an average HPO score of 6.8, PPU was an average scoring organization that performed more or less the same as the other Middle‐East organizations. However, two main issues for PPU emerged that had to be addressed in order to transform the university in an HPO. The first issue was that PPU's performance management process had to be improved, as not everything that mattered to PPU's performance was communicated to everybody adequately enough. The second issue was that the performance‐driven behavior of PPU's people had to be strengthened, as the decision‐making and action‐taking processes took too long and people were nor resilient and flexible enough to deal quickly with changing conditions.Practical implicationsPractically, the research findings could help managers of Middle Eastern organizations to achieve sustainable high performance in their organizations.Originality/valueThe research described in this paper constitutes one of the first studies into the determining factors of sustainable high performance in the Middle East and as such, it adds to the strategic management literature by showing that the HPO concept can be applied in the Middle East to evaluate the high performance status of Middle Eastern organizations.

Achieving High Performance in the United Arab Emirates: The Case of biz‐group

“…Researchers from the HPO Center in the Netherlands were eager to conduct an HPO Diagnosis at biz‐group because it operated in a free trade zone, which had been established to attract foreign investment, promote export, develop disadvantageous regions, and create new jobs. Although the HPO Framework had been tested quite extensively in Asian (Waal, Duong, & Ton, ; Waal & Frijns, ; Waal & Haas, ; Waal & Tan Akaraborworn, ), African (Waal & Chachage, ; Waal, Goedegebuure, & Mulimbika, ), American (Waal, ), and European contexts (Waal, ), only once had it been applied previously to a Middle Eastern entity, in Palestine (Waal & Sultan, ). Performing the HPO Framework diagnosis in the United Arab Emirates—quite a different environment than Palestine—offered the possibility to evaluate the framework in yet another setting.…”

Developing a scale for measuring high performance partnerships

“…In addition the HPO framework has been empirically validated in various countries by administering the questionnaire to organizations in a country and performing confirmatory factor analyses on the collected data. In each case, basically the same factors with underlying characteristicsor a subset of theseappeared (de Waal and Chachage, 2011;de Waal and Frijns, 2011;de Waal and Sultan, 2012;de Waal and de Haas, 2013;de Waal et al, 2014). This makes the HPO Framework, to our knowledge, thus far the only scientifically validated HPO improvement technique in many countries.…”

Key Determinants of Effective Partnerships: The Case of Partnerships Between Lead Firms and Farmers in Pineapple Value Chains in Uganda and Kenya

“…We would further argue that the elements of that model are non-compensatory: a high-performing partner cannot make up for a poorly managed partnership, and a high-performance partnership will not raise the level of a lowperformance organization; likewise we cannot imagine a high-performance partnership where at least one partner doubts the equality in the relationship. De Waal et al (2012) have implicitly used this line of reasoning when they linked the HPP outcomes of their study to the so-called High Performance Organization (HPO) framework (de Waal, 2007(de Waal, , 2010(de Waal, , 2012de Waal & Akaraborworn, 2013;de Waal & Chachage, 2011). An HPO is defined as an organization that achieves financial and non-financial results that are exceedingly better than those of its peer group over a period of time of five years or more, by focusing in a disciplined way on that what really matters to the organization ( de Waal, 2012, p. 5).…”