International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the limitations of existing approaches for guaranteeing the quality of a joint output in temporary enterprise networks such as virtual organisations and to identify possibilities for future research on solving this problem.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper works towards the analysis of requirements for managing quality in temporary networks such as virtual organisations. Afterwards, it discusses the problem and thus the limitations of existing approaches to guarantee quality of the joint output of such networks.

Findings – The review shows that in temporary networks, individual organisations often do not have the right concepts to control inter-organisational information exchange within the network. Nevertheless, inter-organisational information exchange gain is important, because it influences the quality of the network's joint output. Existing approaches to define communication structures to support information exchange on the inter-organisational level do not seem to be sufficient and represent a risk in guaranteeing the quality of a joint output.

Originality/value – This paper explores new directions in quality management from an inter-organisational perspective in temporary enterprises networks. The findings contribute to supporting the need for the further development of existing approaches to competence management in order to address quality aspects in temporary enterprise environments. This work contributes to the theoretical demand for interlinking quality management with highly dynamic collaborative relations. This point of view goes beyond the internally focused perspective with the goal of integrating converging quality management processes with an inter-organisational perspective.