Collecting badges: Understanding the gold rush for business excellence awards

Abstract

Business excellence awards (BEAs) have become all too commonplace. Entering and winning one has now become part of contemporary organising. However, scholarly work examining these awards remains scattered, with the dominant narrative focusing on what could even be described as the intense obsession with award ceremonies. In this paper, we articulate the mechanisms through which the dual demands for managing competitive pressures and achieving competitive advantage drive organisations to enter these awards. In doing this, we integrate and expand upon prior work to explicate an integrative framework for examining how the interactions between various contextual and environmental factors may induce organisations to enter BEAs and the potential outcomes, particularly for those who win or are shortlisted for these awards. We go on to present a set of propositions constituting a contribution, after which our study's implications for the theory and practice of BEAs are outlined.