Creating High-Performance Organizations in Asia: Issues to Consider

André De Waal

doi:10.18646/2056.72.20-007

Abstract

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 described the application of the HPO Framework, a holistic and scientifically validated framework for creating HPOs which has earlier been used successfully at several Asian companies where it was used to identify main organizational areas which have to be strengthened in order for these organizations to become HPOs. In this paper we investigate, based on data collected at organizations in multiple Asian countries, what the main issues are for Asian organizations which they need to address in order to become truly high performing.

Highlights

The Asian continent has gained much in economic importance during the past decades (Ajami, 2018; Price, 2011; Song and Tan, 2011)
In this paper we aimed to use de Waal’s highperformance organizations (HPO) framework (Waal, 2012) to identify the main organizational areas which must be strengthened in order for Asian organizations to be able to transform into HPOs
Based on previous research which used de Waal’s HPO Framework we showed that it was justified to apply this framework, because it was shown to be valid for the Asian context and because Asian organizations in those research studies in general achieve better organizational performance

Summary

Introduction

The Asian continent has gained much in economic importance during the past decades (Ajami, 2018; Price, 2011; Song and Tan, 2011). Spearheaded by countries like China and India (Albrecht, 2005), and supported by countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand, the continent has gained an increasingly larger share of the world economic pie, which has not happened without problems. This could be caused by the low service orientation and quality of human resource management in Asian organizations (Boxall, 2012; Chan et al 2004; Chen et al, 2016; Choi, 2014; Sumardi and Adji, 2018). In order to stay competitive, Asian organizations need to work at their quality by transforming themselves into highperformance organizations (HPO). 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 five years or more, by focusing in a disciplined way on that what really matters to the organization” (de Waal, 2012, p.5)

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