Over the last few years, governments, the public and private sectors, and international trading partners, have and are enforcing``ISO certification'' and other similar quality standards as a requirement for doing business and often demand ISO 9000 accreditation as a prerequisite in their requests for tenders. There have been related criticisms that businesses are thus sometimes seen to be opportunistic in pursuing certification merely to retain and hopefully increase sales rather than improve quality. This research aims to explore whether certification itself provides some guarantee of performance outcomes, or whether such outcomes are dependent on the way in which the accreditation process is introduced into organizations. The results indicate that certification itself seems to provide little guarantee of effective performance outcomes. Rather, performance outcomes are highly dependent on the strategy for implementation, with high performance outcomes being associated with changes to both transformational and transactional organizational variables.

Fourteen companies who were winners of the Australia Quality Award between 1989 and 1993 were surveyed regarding the dynamics of the change processes, which led to their achievement of the awards. It was hypothesized that the organizations which won the award successfully managed the process of complex organizational change. The survey was designed to test various system models and change guidelines that deal with the dynamics of successful change. The authors examine relationships between the effectiveness of the various change processes covered in the questionnaire on the one hand and the perceived success of the total quality management (TQM) program on the other. This study is thus relevant to the question of the relative importance of the different factors which impact on the successful introduction of a TQM program in an organization. It was found that a number of factors were important for successful transformation to a quality culture and practice. Although clarity of vision, participation, cultural communications, and resource support were all important, the critical factor appeared to be active management support for the change.

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Surveys 14 companies, winners of the Australia Quality Award between 1989 and 1993, regarding the dynamics of the change processes which led to their achievement of the awards. Hypothesizes that the organizations which won the award have successfully managed the process of complex organizational change. The survey was designed to test various system models and change guidelines that deal with the dynamics of successful change. The findings strongly supported these guidelines, i.e. that successful change was systemic and occurred simultaneously and complementarily in a number of organizational subsystems.

A survey of 24 museums of various kinds in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA sought to identify the processes that these organisations used to manage change. It was hypothesised that those organisations which were assessed by respondents to have achieved successful change outcomes would also have managed the change process in accordance with general guidelines on effective change in the change literature. The general guidelines largely recommend a consultative or participative style of leadership as being most effective for leading change. Recent contingency models relating change leadership style to change strategy predict that participative leadership styles are not always appropriate or effective for leading change, and that under circumstances, exceptions to the general guidelines would apply. However, it was argued that due to the nature of museums as professional bureaucracies, such exceptions are unlikely to occur for the organisations studied in this paper. The findings provided strong support for these general principles of effective change management.