| Abstract: | The striving for business improvement and stronger customer orientation causes many organisations to aspire and participate in a quality award process. The purpose of the study is to assess the impact of the participation on organisational performance in the selected three organisations that have participated in the Ethiopian Quality Award process. The organisations were selected in order to clarify how this award process could be used to improve organisational performance. The study focuses primarily on analyses of soft measures such as organisational core values. Descriptive statistics has been employed to assess the self-assessment exercise and their impact on organisational performance. Interview of key personnel’s in the organisations, and document review were also conducted. Several cases on how to approach and benefit from a quality award process, and thereby to improve organisational performance, are provided. The studied organisations have been successful in their development and communication of visions and missions of the organisations to their employees as well as stakeholders, and also in their empowerment of employees. Specifically, the core values of customer orientation, process orientation, continuous improvement, Management involvement/commitment and participation by everyone needs to be more strengthened. Findings from the study studies indicate that if the goal is to get lasting results, it is not sufficient to participate in a quality award process, but rather plan and implement the improvement projects proposed by the self-assessment practices. The need to do more on training and awareness on EQA model principles and change management by EQA were also part of the findings of the study. Also, to benefit fully from the participation practice, only one should participate in the process several times, with enough time in between the applications in order to complete as many as possible of the improvement projects resulting from the evaluations. In addition to this the practice has improved their overall organizational performance in terms of customer satisfaction and gaining more business. However, the result also indicates some weaknesses like, lack of leadership commitment and involvement of employees in decision making. |
