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

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).