Management decisions for effective ISO 9000 accreditation

Abstract

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.

Organisational behaviour and strategies in the adoption of certified management systems: an analysis of the Spanish hotel industry

“…Furthermore, like companies in other industries that perceive high rewards for adopting SMSs (Abraham et al, 2000;Briscoe et al, 2005;Balzarova et al, 2006), hotels implementing a larger number of management standards perceive improvements in their corporate image, knowing that the respective certificates can be used in hotel advertising as a selling point for consumers seeking a certain quality of service. According to Terlaak and King (2006), obtaining quality certification is a "market signal" that enables "an organisation to communicate about its unobserved quality attributes" and consequently "a certified organisation may be able to gain an advantage vis-à-vis its non-certified competitors".…”

ISO 9000 registration’s impact on sales and profitability

“…Support for this view is found in a survey of 192 Dutch firms where financial benefits were contingent on firms having internal reasons for pursuing accreditation (Singles et al, 2001). Further insights into the motivation theme are provided by the research of Abraham et al (2000), who found that certification provided little guarantee of high performance outcomes unless accompanied by substantial changes in leadership, structure and communications.…”

Quality and quality assurance in Ethiopian higher education

“…ISO 9001: refers to a series of standards for quality assurance within organizations, introduced in 1987 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which is based in Geneva, Switzerland (Abraham, et al, 2000). The series of the ISO 9001 standards are designed based on the concept that 'certain minimum characteristics of a quality management system could be usefully standardized with a focus on process rather than product' (ibid).…”