Organisational self-assessment options: a classification and a conceptual map for SMEs

The growing importance and considerable prestige that quality awards hold have encouraged firms to adopt “excellence models” as evaluation frameworks for organisational self-assessment. This has contributed to the spread of a specific form of self-assessment logic: primarily, the search for conformity to a set of non-prescriptive requirements that reflect validated, leading-edge management practices; secondarily, the search of alignment of practices with organisational needs and business factors. But the adoption of this kind of self-assessment is not necessarily the proper “choice”, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper examines the nature of the diagnostic processes incorporated in award-based self-assessment and in other diagnostic models developed in the organisational literature. This analysis provides the foundation for the development of a classification matrix that enables us to differentiate five self-assessment approaches (paradigmatic, normative, situational, normative-situational, and open), which can be implemented either with a process-based or a non-process-based analytical frame. On the basis of this matrix we outline a “conceptual map” that could help SMEs in questioning the meaning and substance of “organisational self-assessment” so as to choose knowingly and rationally frameworks and diagnostics instruments.