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.