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 isno 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 9001standard 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 only19 empirical studies selected that were relevant and fitted to the criteria of thestudy 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.