Proposal of a causal model measuring the impact of an ISO 9001 certified Quality Management System on financial performance of Moroccan service-based companies

Implemented by an increasing number of organisations worldwide, the ISO 9001 standard for quality management received considerable attention in the existing literature. Researchers worldwide have found positive, negative and even mixed effects of ISO 9001 certification on firms' performance, while in Morocco this issue has been rarely examined. It is the combination of these observations that led to this study. The aim of this paper is to test and validate a causal model designed to measure the performance of an ISO 9001 certified Quality Management System (QMS) and its impact on a company's financial performance. By means of this causal analysis/model, the study examines the relationship between: QMS and the financial performance of 41 companies based in Morocco; the management responsibility process and all the QMS processes; the management resources process and all the QMS processes; the organisational and financial performance of the studied companies. All of the considered firms are part of the service industry and range from medium-sized to large companies. The data gathered in this study have been instrumental in devising actionable insights. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was the statistical software platform that enabled the use of a linear regression analysis to prove the positive correlation between the above-mentioned elements.