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Introduction
Several organizations choose to be process oriented. Process orientation (PO) means focusing on business processes ranging from customer to customer instead of placing emphasis on functional and hierarchical structures ([33] Reijers, 2006). PO emphasizes process as opposed to hierarchies with special focus on outcomes, particularly customer satisfaction ([25] McCormack and Johnson, 2001a). A process-oriented organization is also often referred to as "horizontal organization" ([31] Ostroff, 1999), "process centered organization" ([14] Hammer, 1996), "process enterprise" ([15] Hammer and Stanton, 1999), "process focused organization" ([9] Gardner, 2004) or simply "process organization" ([30] Osterloh and Frost, 2006).
A process-oriented organization comprehensively applies, the concept of business process management (BPM). A firm which adopted the process-view of its organization, regardless of whether it has already run through business process reengineering (BPR) and/or process improvement projects or not, is concerned with the management of its business processes ([1] Armistead and Machin, 1998). BPM does not only incorporate the discovery, design, deployment, and execution of business processes, but also interaction, control, analysis, and optimization of processes ([38] Smith and Fingar, 2003).
This paper deals with the effects of PO and BPM. It does not examine the effects of BPR. The main difference between BPM and BPR is that the former refers to the ongoing management of an organization based on its business processes, whereas the latter is a single project concerned with the radical redesign of business processes. [11] Garvin (1995) states that BPR often addresses the reengineering of individual processes only. Therefore, the BPR approach often treats processes as unconnected islands. However, the success of an organization also depends on how its business processes interact. Moreover, a business processes still have to be managed after having it reengineered, but reengineering experts virtually do not state how to manage a business process after reengineering.
The objective of this study is to provide an extensive literature review on the effects of PO. There is a myriad of literature on the topic of PO and the positive and (partly negative) effects of PO have been addressed by several authors. However, a literature review about studies examining the effects of PO has not been provided yet. The paper begins with an operationalisation of the PO construct followed by a description of the research...