ISO 9001 Standard and Organization's Performance: A Literature Review

Nowadays, ISO 9001 has been adopted by different organizations in all over the world. This
standard was first introduced in 1978 by International Organization for Standardization
(ISO). Several empirical studies revealed the importance of this quality management tool
for improving continuously performance within the organizations, in order to satisfy
customer's needs and promote competitiveness in the market. Although ISO 9001 standard
has shown its usefulness to the companies from different sectors, but there is no consensus
among practitioners and scholars whether ISO 9001 considerably enables to improve firms'
performance. Thus, this study was performed to review the findings of the empirical
studies, which tested the hypothesized relationship between ISO 9001 standard and the
different perspectives of organization's performance, in order to present an aggregate
overview of the role of ISO standard in improving performance in the organizations from
different sectors. So, the research was designed to identify, select, and review the empirical
studies that were relevant to the objectives of the research, and likewise published between
2002 and 2017. From literature review, the only 19 empirical studies selected that were
relevant and fitted to the criteria of the study with the aim of obtaining the results and
conclusions. Finally, the analysis of the results of the empirical studies uncovered that ISO
9001 significantly affected internal business process, while this standard was not correlated
with the indicators of innovation and learning perspective at significant level. Furthermore,
the systematic review of the existing literature provided enough evidence that the
effectiveness of ISO 9001 on customer's results and financial performance were unclear and
contradictory.