Asian Journal of Management

Durai Anand Kumar ¹, V. Balakrishnan ¹

Affiliations
1 Anna university of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, IN

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to highlight the basic facts about the ISO certification and why considerable proportion of organizations fail even after getting certified to International system standards such as ISO 9001 Quality Management System (QMS) This study investigated the practical problems faced by the certified organizations represented by a sample group of 100 contractors from the UAE (40 Mechanical Contractors, 30 Electrical Contractors and 30 Civil contractors and a stratified random sample of 40 organizations with 1-50 staff,40 organizations with 51-100 staff and 20 organizations with more than 100 staff) and classified them through 25 variables, evaluated the effectiveness of the organizations and highlighted the major areas of system gaps. This study has revealed that there were certain system gaps in majority of the ISO 9001 QMS Certified organizations. The gaps were classified into 4 basic categories such as a) Leadership related issues b) Strategy related issues c) Quality system related issues and d) Social responsibility related issues. Out of the ten constructs tested hypothetically, nine constructs revealed a significant relationship impacting the overall system performance. Out of these 9 significant elements, only 5 have been specified in ISO 9001 Standard explicitly. With these gaps, compliance to the minimum requirements of ISO 9001 QMS is a challenge and such organizations need a solution to rectify these gaps and achieve business excellence. This study can be used as a basis to verify the effectiveness of management system in any organization and also to identify the barriers which hinder the business benefits. This study remains a basis for further research to develop and customize a model for organizations to achieve business excellence.

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Durai Anand Kumar ¹, V. Balakrishnan ¹

Affiliations
1 Anna University of Technology, Coimbatore, South, IN

Abstract

Purpose:- The purpose of this paper is to study how effective was the social responsibility demonstrated by the Mechanical, Electrical and Civil contracting organizations of the United Arab Emirates, in relation to the CSR framework of European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), and to identify the areas of strength and challenges in such CSR practices.

Design/Methodology/Approach:- A comprehensive review was made on the CSR literature. The recently published articles and best practices in the related subject were taken into consideration, including the EFQM Publications concerned. Our focus in this study was to select a stratified random sample of 50 organizations in the UAE and study their CSR characteristics such as their methodology and evaluation of CSR activities in relation to the best-practices. In this study, 8 constructs were tested to experiment the inter relationship between the variables driving the CSR performance. All the 8 variables were hypothetically proven to have a significant relationship, including the 5 EFQM CSR approaches. Strong areas and deficiencies in CSR initiatives by these organizations were classified and elaborated accordingly.

Findings:- The existing CSR activities of UAE organizations were compared with the 5 basic approaches of EFQM CSR framework and validated that all these approaches had a significant impact on the CSR performance. Social responsibility was found to gain focus in the UAE, with strong areas being a clear strategic direction and a sound financial capability. Some deficiencies were revealed in demonstrating social responsibility, which were classified into 5 major categories. Considering the UAE Government’s strategic destination termed as “Vision 2030”, the social responsibility practices need to improve in certain areas as highlighted in this paper.

Originality / Value addition in this paper: Even though the study focused on the organizations at UAE, regardless of their country of location, size and scope of work, this study is expected to be useful for any organization to get a overview on the method of planning, deploying, evaluating and refining the CSR performance.

Keywords

i) Corporate Social Responsibility ii) C.S.R iii) Social Responsibility iv) Corporate Conscience v) Corporate Citizenship vi) Social Performance vii) Sustainable Responsible Business.

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