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The Dutch supermarket industry is dominated by a small number of powerful companies which capture the majority of sales and which compete fiercely with each other. This competition is mainly quality based, in the sense of offering increasingly more products of higher quality and striving for better distribution mechanisms. Interestingly there does not seem to be much attention for the quality of the internal supermarket organisation, i.e. quality of people, internal processes, and performance reporting. Thus there seems to be a gap in both current literature and the quality improvement attention of supermarkets which needs to be addressed, to uncover new sources of improvement. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this paper, the authors introduce the high-performance organisation (HPO) framework, a validated technique for evaluating the strength of the internal organisation of companies and for proposing quality improvements. The aim of the research is to test whether the HPO Framework can be used to analyse the strength and performance of supermarkets and to come up with recommendations for improvement. A questionnaire into the drivers of success of supermarkets was constructed which was send to 400 supermarket franchisers, and the received data were subsequently analysed.

On average the participating supermarkets are well-performing but they cannot yet be classified as high performing according to the HPO Framework. The supermarkets with the highest HPO scores indeed achieve better financial results (both in terms of revenue and margin achieved) than those of supermarkets with lower HPO scores. Finally, the authors find that larger supermarkets (in square metres floor area) outperform smaller supermarkets on all HPO factors.

As the HPO Framework is shown to be useful for not only analysing the performance of the supermarkets but also to generate recommendations for improvement of those supermarkets, individual supermarkets should evaluate their performance and operations using the HPO Framework to come up with improvement recommendations tailored to their own situation.

The HPO Framework has been applied during the past years in many sectors but not yet in the supermarket industry. Thus this research provides a unique insight in this industry. In addition academic researchers can use the HPO Framework to further investigate specific areas and factors of the supermarkets, in order to add to the literature on the quality of supermarkets.

One of the most important factors for the success of an organization is the quality of its managers. However, this is a rather general statement, because there are many different types of managers with different work styles. This begs the question: are all types of managers, regardless of their work styles, important to organizational success or only managers with specific work styles? This study aims to investigate the answer to this question by examining the relationship between two specific elements of managers' work styles – the role a manager plays in the work team and the preferred manner of change management a manager applies – and their effect on the level of performance of their organization, as measured by the high-performance organization (HPO) framework.

This study was part of a larger study into the drivers of success of franchise supermarkets in The Netherlands. A questionnaire was constructed, in which, among others, the following were explored: the level of performance (according to the HPO Framework), the preferred team role of the franchiser (using the Belbin team role model) and the change management approach of the franchiser (using De Caluwe and Vermaak's color theory). The questionnaire was sent to 400 Dutch supermarket franchisers, and the data received were subject to statistical analysis.

The study results clearly indicated that certain types of managers are important to organizational success in the supermarket sector. There are specific types of managers – in the sense that these managers have specific roles they play and specific change styles they apply – that seem to be more effective in creating and maintaining an HPO. These roles, as described by Belbin, are chairman and plant; the change style is De Caluwe and Vermaak's color red.

The study results add to the literature on high performance and HPOs, because team roles and color change styles have not been related to the factors for high performance to date.

Although the fact that certain types of managers, in certain contexts, are more effective than others is not a new finding, this is the first time specific team roles and a specific change style have been found that would enable managers to create and maintain an HPO.