Abstract
A responsible business reflects the fundamental values of a society and is important for all enterprises. It can improve their economic, environmental, and social characteristics from a short- and long-term perspective through innovative products and services, new capabilities, and stakeholder involvement. This study aims to identify the common convergent factors of voluntary instruments in management systems to achieve sustainable business and competitive growth. There are several tools aimed at achieving sustainability and competitiveness, an important component of which is the subject of this study: the voluntary approach. To determine the key factors of this approach, we used the online questionnaire technique of data collection (n = 183). We also conducted exploratory analysis with factors estimated by the principal components and orthogonal rotation using the varimax method. Relevant driving forces are identified in the development of the business models of sustainability and competitiveness, including the integration of quality, environment and occupational safety and health management systems, the environmental profile of the organisation for economic and social affairs, voluntary reporting of environmental activities, and evaluation of environmental impacts. These factors make a significant contribution towards improving environmental sustainability while ensuring competitive business. The ability to move quickly and successfully to these business models is an important source of sustainable competitive advantage.
Highlights
The main goal of this study is to identify the common convergent factors of voluntary instruments in management systems to achieve sustainable business and competitive growth
The results show that the enterprises’ commitment to sustainable development represents the potential to achieve a competitive advantage and increase the competitiveness of the enterprises in the market as a whole in every sector of the economy
One should be careful in interpreting this statement because a difference apparently exists between merely perceiving the importance of social responsibility from the perspective of the three pillars and the implementation of the respective policies
Summary
Previous studies have shown that humanity is facing decreasing ecosystem quality (Broman & Robèrt, 2017; Kajikawa et al, 2014; Orecchini et al, 2012; Steffen et al, 2015), population growth (Kopnina, 2017), poverty (Cuaresma et al, 2018), global inequality (Diffenbaugh & Burke, 2019; Orecchini et al, 2012), climate change (Ahmed, 2020), decreasing biological diversity (Kopnina, 2017), breach of trust (Broman & Robèrt, 2017), and globally inadequate economic growth (Orecchini et al, 2012). Global networks are created for research in the area of sustainability and cooperation between industry and academic spheres (Orecchini et al, 2012). A broadly conceived implementation of education promoting sustainable development can be mentioned (O’Flaherty & Liddy, 2018), which is absolutely necessary (Wiek et al, 2012). Hák et al (2016) warn that given the high number of goals that come under sustainable development, numerous indicators can be expected, and they suggest a solution consisting of a larger set of indicators and a small set of key indicators that meet certain criteria, such as intelligibility, timeliness, and scope
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