Investigating context factors in the strategic management of corporate sustainability integration

Abstract

Adequately understanding the role of context factors in the successful development of corporate sustainability-oriented initiatives is an important step towards an integrative vision of sustainability at the organizational level. In the present research, an extensive and structured literature review enabled the identification of 19 context factors relevant for sustainability integration processes. The importance of these context factors was confirmed through a quantitative exploratory research with 156 experienced sustainability professionals from 42 different countries. The results obtained reveal that Commitment, Engagement, Information, Communication and Trust have the highest levels of perceived importance. The results also indicate that the relative importance of these context factors is higher for small and medium sized companies and for companies located in countries with lower Gross Domestic Product. The role of the context factors was analyzed on the scope of the operational stages of a strategic management framework focusing corporate sustainability integration – the Integrative Sustainability Intelligence model. The main contributions of this paper are: the identification of context factors relevant for corporate sustainability integration processes, combining the perspectives of scholars and sustainability professionals; the analysis of the role of the most relevant context factors in the strategic management of corporate sustainability integration processes, enabling the identification of pathways to promote their successful operationalization.