ISO 9001 certification motivations can be classified into two main categories: (1) internal motivations; and (2) external motivations. Internal motivations are related with genuine organisational improvement goals (productivity, internal communication, process performance), while external motivations are mainly related to promotional and marketing issues (customer and market pressures, market share). Some companies that become certified mostly upon the basis of external motivations define their main goal as ‘obtaining registration’, and thus typically adopt a limited view over the scope of quality management systems implementation and certification.

Based upon a detailed review of 100 ISO 9001 audit reports, we performed a detailed statistical comparison between both types of motivations driving companies in their certification efforts, explored their differences and similarities and derived a statistically based classification model that was able to predict, for a particular organisation, what kind of predominant motivation lead to its certification, from information that can be retrieved from the contents of the corresponding ISO 9001 audit reports.

Volume 21

Número 11-12