Quality management awards and sports facilities' performance

This paper investigates whether achievement of externally accredited quality awards is associated with better performance in English sports and leisure centres. The investigation uses data from 98 centres which undertook the National Benchmarking Service for sport and leisure centres in 2006/07. These data are organised into four performance dimensions – access (who uses facilities), utilisation (how many users), finance and customer satisfaction. The investigation identifies differences between the performance of centres with quality awards and those without such awards. It tests the statistical significance of these differences. It also correlates the number of awards for each centre with performance. The results offer mixed evidence regarding the association of quality awards with better performance. Centres with quality awards achieve better performance in clear majorities of indicators for financial subsidy, facility utilisation and customer importance-satisfaction gaps associated with selected facility attributes. However, most of these differences are not statistically significant (p < 0.05). There is a weak correlation between the number of awards and performance, which is at its strongest for utilisation and importance-satisfaction gaps. Three of the four quality awards investigated are associated with stronger performance for certain performance dimensions. One quality award, however, is associated with weaker performance for all four performance dimensions. The main implication of this paper is that if quality awards are a means to achieving better performance, then managers need to consider carefully which dimensions of performance they are seeking to improve, as a criterion for deciding which award to aim for.