Factors Affective for Sustaining Quality Management Practices: Award Firms Perspectives Mehran Doulat Abadi 1 & Sha’ri Mohd Yusof 2 1,2 Universiti Teknologi Malaysia 1 dmehran2@live.utm.my; 2 shari@fkm.utm.my Abstract: National quality award models are being used to assess and recognize excellent organizations throughout the globe. Achieving an excellent level of quality management is difficult and enormous task, but, sustaining this achievement level is even much harder and challenging. The success of practices with quality management approaches are generally linked with certain critical factors. The objective of this paper is to explore the factors that contribute to sustaining quality management practice in the United Arab Emirates. The target sample was included the Dubai Quality Award recipients companies from various sectors and industry. The quality managers and business excellence managers representing the each organization made the unit of analysis of the study. Based on survey, the eight factors have been identified and analyzed as critical to quality management practices. The developed critical factors should serve as a guide to those organizations in the region to sustain quality management practices in their ongoing quest towards higher quality levels. Keywords: Critical factors; Dubai quality awards; quality practice; United Arab Emirates 1. Introduction For decades, quality management subject has been regarded as a very important competitive priority for the long-term success of an organization with an emphasis on excellence. Organizations across the world regardless of their size, type and sector have now come to understand that they need to excel in every aspect of their business performance (Harrington, 2005; Lu, 2011). One proven method for improving organizational performance towards excellence is through embracing self-evaluation. For that reason, a significant number of companies have adopted the business excellence (BX) as the next step after Total Quality Management (TQM) in this regards. Business excellence or organizational excellence is one of the modern quality management initiatives, with an aim of long-run success through continuous quality improvement. The concept is based on the world wide acceptance of quality assessment frameworks (Laszlo, 1996) helping organizations to develop and manage their continuous improvement activities in a number of ways (van der Wiele et al., 2000). The Deming Prize (DP), the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model, the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence (BCPE), and Australian Business Excellence Framework (ABEF) are the frontier examples of worldwide adopted quality management V1-12 － 77 － ICQ'14-Tokyo, Japan 10.19-10.22, 2014