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ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and New Management Standards pp 17–38Cite as

What Drives the Quality of Certifiable Management System Standards Implementation? Insights from the ISO 9001 Standard

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Part of the book series: Measuring Operations Performance ((MEOP))

Abstract

Despite the important role certifiable management system standards (CMSS) play in our globalised economies, there still exists a gap in the literature regarding firms’ motives to implement these standards. This is mainly due to the fact that existing literature perceives certification as synonymous with implementation and does not take into account that quality of implementation, of CMSS among companies, varies. This chapter makes two important contributions. The first one is that it provides quantitative evidence to the relatively few studies that analyse quality of CMSS implementation. In doing so, this work advances our understanding of the factors that motivate firms to implement these standards. Most importantly, in contrast to previous studies that analyse drivers of average implementation of CMSS, this chapter also examines the motives related to low, medium and above average implementation of such standards. Using a novel dataset of 201, ISO 9001 certified firms, located in Greece, our analysis shows that sixty per cent of firms in the sample fail to conform to the requirements of the standard. In contrast to the dominant neo-institutional view in the analysis of CMSS, our econometric findings suggest that competitive motivations are the influential drivers in making companies fully commit to ISO 9001 (i.e. above average implementation).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Spence’s argument is that when there is asymmetric information, productive workers will attend a college for differentiating themselves from the non-productive, as long as the college diploma is perceived by stakeholders as a credible signal of good performance capabilities (1973).

  2. 2.

    The Likert scale ranges from: 1 (not influence), 2 (little influence), 3 (some influence), 4 (influential), 5 (very influential).

  3. 3.

    The Likert scale ranges from: 1 (never), 2 (seldom), 3 (sometimes), 4 (often), and 5 (always).

  4. 4.

    Recent studies on ISO 14001 (Aravind and Christmann 2011) have reached the same conclusions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Centre for Business, Organisations and Society, University of Bath, Bath, UK

    Konstantinos Iatridis

  2. Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Effie Kesidou

Authors
  1. Konstantinos Iatridis
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  2. Effie Kesidou
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Correspondence to Konstantinos Iatridis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, University of the Basque Country, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain

    Iñaki Heras-Saizarbitoria

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Iatridis, K., Kesidou, E. (2018). What Drives the Quality of Certifiable Management System Standards Implementation? Insights from the ISO 9001 Standard. In: Heras-Saizarbitoria, I. (eds) ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and New Management Standards. Measuring Operations Performance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65675-5_2

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