Identifying Causal Loops for Common Approaches of the EFQM Excellence Model

Nowadays, entering the field of quality management is one of particular importance to organizations. This is due to the intense competition, globalization and diversified product services that have made the need for quality development at all levels in organizations inevitable. The country's banking system is no exception because of the fierce competition. Organizational Excellence Models are the tools that guide organizations along this path. Organizations including the country's banking network, are adopting a variety of approaches within their organization to realize the values of excellence models. However, the limitation of available resources such as cost, manpower, organizational culture, etc. does not allow all of these approaches to be deployed. Therefore, the key question is which approaches will have the most impact on quality improvement.

The main purpose of this study is to explore the dynamic relationships between approaches and criteria and sub-criteria of EFQM organizational excellence model. For this purpose, first, the usual approaches in organizational excellence model are extracted and due to their high volume, they are clustered by fuzzy clustering method and finally, causal loops between variables are extracted by system dynamics method.

The result of leading research is the causal linkage model between the categories of common approaches in the organizational excellence model.

In this study, common approaches in I.R. Iran’s banking network are identified and during of using system dynamics, it is possible to simulate the behavior of the system using causal loops.