ENVIRONMENTAL LINKAGES Like other organizations, high performance organizations are open systems

influenced by the rapidly moving external environment with its global emphasis and rapidly changing
customer expectations. Among the most important inputs are the organizational worksite’s problems
and opportunities and the organization’s purpose, mission, and strategy, along with its vision. HPOs
typically develop a mission and vision package that ties these elements together and integrates them
with the organization’s core values.30 In a true HPO, this vision/direction package must involve
employees and managers at all organization levels. This blending is crucial to ensuring a high level of
acceptance by everybody in the organization. This high level of mutual acceptance is a key difference
between HPOs and other more traditional organizations. The previously mentioned HPO components—
employee involvement, self-directed work teams, integrated manufacturing technologies, organizational
learning, and total quality management—make unique contributions to the transformation of inputs
into outputs. The outputs basically consist of individual, group, and organizational effectiveness and
contributions to society. Organizational effectiveness looks at how well the HPO has done financially and
what the quality of work life is for members of the organization. The latter includes satisfaction,
commitment to the organization, and many other measures of this kind. Contributions to society are
those the organization is making to society through charitable contributions, volunteer activities by
managers and workers, and many other similar activities.31 This open systems perspective therefore
means that the inputs, transformation processes, and outputs are all influenced by the external
environment and all influence each other. Thus, there is feedback from the outputs to the
transformation components and