A systematic review on high performance organization

This paper aims to synthesize existing knowledge on high performance organization (HPO) in terms of definitions, contemporary trends and findings from empirical studies; from which areas for future research can be proposed.

This systematic literature review applies the matrix method to analyze major HPO literature in peer-reviewed English articles. A total of 73 articles have been found in 59 journals.

There are three key findings that emerged from this study. First, the research on HPO has been burgeoned in the past decades, generating several compelling studies in different contexts. The trend of HPO research is now shifting from theory development to theory validation. Second, HPO has been defined in various ways in the extant literature. However, they all address the importance of aligning the firms’ resources with the market demand and integrating various types of performance to measure HPO relative to competitors for a prolonged period. Third, an assessment of empirical HPO studies revealed gaps in terms of the research context, research design and the HPO’s nomological network.

The literature search in this review targeted at only articles published in the English language; therefore, publications in other languages were not included.

The strength of this study is that it provided an updated systematic review of HPO literature, is therefore, valuable in providing an overall picture of the current state of HPO research and providing potential directions for future studies.