According to the literature, ISO 9000 certification motivations can be classified into two
main categories: internal motivations and external motivations. Internal motivations are
related to genuine organisational improvement goals (productivity, internal communication,
internal processes performance improvement), while external ones are mainly
related to promotional and marketing issues (customer and market pressures, market
share improvement). Some companies that become certified based mostly upon external
motivations defined their main goal as ‘obtaining registration’, and thus are of a very
limited nature in terms of quality management systems implementation and certification.Although these two groups of motivations are present in the majority of the companies,
usually only one is the most important and predominant
Issues related to ISO 9001 certification motivations have been already deeply and
exhaustively analyzed in the quality management literature. However, the use of statistical
quantitative methodologies of classification, in order to categorize companies according to
their main ISO 9001 motivation, corresponds to a new contribution to the quality management
and ISO 9000 standards literature. With our research we were able to develop classi-
fication methodologies which allow one to classify companies, according to their dominant
ISO 9000 motivation, using information gathered from their audit report profiles.