High Performance Environments (Lane4 Funded PhD)
Research Question: What are the key psychological and social factors which predict organisational performance and differentiate between high performing and low performing organisations?
Lead Researcher: Dr. Mark Gittins, Lane4 and University of Wales, Bangor
Project Summary
The majority of research in the field of performance psychology has focused on the individual and the team, with the result that the performance environment has often been overlooked or factored out.
The aim of this research, conducted in conjunction with the University of Wales, Bangor, was to address high performance from a contextual viewpoint and to develop and validate a �High Performance Environment (HPE) model� of the key psychological and social factors which impact upon organisational performance. By high performance we mean performance which is consistently higher than that of the majority of peer organisations in the same sector, and over a prolonged time period.
There are clear benefits of such a model to practitioners in any performance domain. The model provides a list of important variables to consider in performance development work. This will encourage practitioners to consider performance environments as a whole, rather than considering specific variables in isolation.
Development
The HPE was developed as a result of an extensive review of the organisational performance literature in which business, sport, and military domains featured prominently. The model was specifically developed to be applicable across these performance domains, and as such, transferability between them was an important consideration during the development of the model. The development of the model was a challenging task because of the inherent complexity and number of factors at play. It was important that all of the constructs included had either been shown to be associated with organisational performance, or associated with other factors which have been. These constructs were conceptualised within the model under the headings of:
- leadership behaviours
- performance enablers
- people factors
- organisational climate
A measure of the model - the HPE Scan - has also been developed and used to collect sufficient data from a sample of organisations to validate the model. This sample comprised organisations from sectors as diverse as management consulting, aviation, leisure, legal, IT services, investment banking, engineering and construction, and retail.
Currently further analysis is being conducted to investigate which factors within the model discriminate between high and low performing organisations. Future work will continue to investigate both relationships between factors within the model and the predictive relationship between the model and organisational performance measures.
Application
In terms of application, the HPE model and scan have been used for a variety of purposes, including the assessment of perceptions of employees involved in mergers and acquisitions, as a framework to develop a people development strategy, to benchmark against competitors, to address underperformance, to understand intra-organisational performance discrepancies, and to demonstrate organisational health in order to secure financial investment.
This research was funded by Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP), a government-funded programme to help businesses to improve their competitiveness and productivity through the better use of knowledge, technology and skills that reside within the UK knowledge base. This collaboration between Lane4 Management Group and University of Wales, Bangor won one of nine best project awards in 2007.
Please contact mark.gittins@lane4.co.uk for further information.
Download Creating an Environment Where Performance is Inevitable and Sustainable: The High Performance Environment Model below.
Dr. Mark Gittins, Lane4 | 2008-09-02