Customers' Perspectives on ISO 9001 QMS Auditors' Personality Traits: A Preliminary Investigation from Taiwan's Certificated Companies

Under the trend of global trade, there becomes no boundary among countries. Following the tendency for achieving good quality, not only on the quality focus of products, Taiwan's companies paid much attention to quality system certification. Achieving the ISO 9001 quality management system certificate become the first priority for the quality level recognition of those companies. During the certification process of the ISO 9000 QMS, the auditors played an important role. Therefore, their personality traits may affect the result of certification, and customer's satisfaction level. In this research, by applying questionnaire analysis, we tried to review ISO 9001 QMS auditors' personality traits from customers' viewpoints. A questionnaire with 15 questions was used to collect the data, both from "importance expectation" and "perceived experience" sides, from Taiwan's ISO 9001 QMS certificated companies. There're 77 valid responded questionnaires in our research. From Cronbach's coefficient, the dimensions design of our questionnaire was verified and had both good reliability and validity. By applying paired-t test under 95% confidence interval for all 15 questions, only question number 8 (Under the pressure of work, auditors can effectively cope with) showed no significant difference. From which we can find the common existing gaps between "importance expectation" and "perceived experience" for audited companies. Also, a model for ISO 9000 QMS auditors' personality traits was proposed. All 4 factors with grouped questions were "interpersonal relationship and interaction" with question 5, 3, 4, 9, "self-discipline and growth" with question 11, 15, 12, 14, 13, "stick-to and focus" with question 6, 10, 7, 8, "integrity and objectivity" with question 1, 2. Results from analysis of those questionnaires can provided as a reference base for the certification organizations for their auditors' qualification definition and training purposes.