With the demand of the markets becoming much more dynamic in meeting customers’ expectations and having the edge over others, improvement in existing processes is compulsory. Therefore, improvement initiative (IMI) provides guidelines for achieving organizational goals which are to optimize profit and enhance productivity. However, several cases have been reported with low rates of success of the IMI’s practice in which they have failed to achieve the intended improvement result, and one of the factors is a lack of awareness of the critical success factors (CSF). The process to identify the key success factors is significant as it allows organizations to focus their effort to make sure they are equipped with proper knowledge when implementing the initiatives and avoid improvement failures in the future. In addition, the lack of reference related to the integration of CSFs from different initiatives from existing studies allows a new study to bridge this research gap. Thus, the objective of the study is to develop a reference model of critical success factors toward successful implementation from the viewpoints of nine different strategic IMI. This study incorporated positivism as the research perspective. A total of 72 publications were used to extract the information needed which later enable the conceptual model development. To ensure the generalization of the model, a quantitative research method was adopted from surveys gathered from various organizations in Malaysia. The reflective-formative hierarchical model was then developed and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) via Smart PLS to validate the CSF model.