Excellence and Organizational Institutionalization: A Conceptual Model

Organizations, while dealing with the institutionalization process, seek the way to assure their long-term survival. With this aim, firms try to further the economic-managerial dimension in order to turn themselves into institutions capable of satisfying the needs and expectations of all their interest groups. Nevertheless, there is a lack of concrete guidelines and a defined waybill. Hence, there exists a need for a transformation model that could turn into a set of structured processes which organizations would systematically implement. This model aims to serve as a guide for firms in their intention of becoming institutions. The EFQM excellence model is a non-prescriptive framework that helps organizations in their purpose of meeting the needs and expectations of all their stakeholders and thus achieving outstanding, sustainable, long-term results. In our chapter, we reveal how organizations use the EFQM model and implement the fundamental concepts of excellence as a roadmap for the conversion from organizations to institutions. Moreover, firms approach this in a structured, consistent, measurable, open and flexible way. In order to endorse our findings, we propose a conceptual model that considers all the drivers that characterize organizational institutionalization and the fundamental concepts of excellence as a result of the implementation of conceptual maps with a panel of first-level experts in Excellence in Management in Spain.