Abstract
Higher education institutions (HEIs) have been urged to integrate sustainability across all their structural and organizational dimensions. A promising area of research and practice that can help to deliver this is organizational change management for sustainability. While this field has received increasing attention over the past decade, a comprehensive assessment is still lacking. Therefore, a systematic quantitative review was carried out to summarize and synthesize the academic literature on organizational change management approaches that aim to holistically embed sustainability in HEIs. Furthermore, this review aims to illustrate what change factors have been observed and how they have been analyzed, and from this highlight implications for practice and pathways for future research. The literature reviewed puts strong emphasis on change processes and human factors, as well as elements of the institutional framework, such as vision and strategy. The findings highlight the value of strategic and reflective actions, the importance of understanding and actively shaping change processes, and that change towards sustainability requires broad stakeholder input and commitment. This review serves as an important reference point for future research and practice.
Highlights
While there is still room for improvement, regarding explicitness of organization theory and theoretical frameworks used, this review has shown that there is an increasing number of high-quality papers detailing organizational change approaches that aim to embed sustainability holistically into Higher education institutions (HEIs)
A particular focus is on change processes and the human side of change, such as conceptualization of sustainability, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors
Other focal points are content factors comprising the institutional framework and to a lesser extent assessment and reporting. This emphasizes that implementing changes within the institutional framework and assessment and reporting are likely to affect the wider organizational system, often through activating leverage points for holistic change
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are better equipped and more obliged to support and accelerate change towards sustainability than any other institution, since they can significantly contribute to education and moral engagement of future leaders and citizens [1]. Most approaches have been unsuccessful in catalyzing systemic change, since they have focused too much on individual issues such as recycling or renewable energy [7,8]. The literature on sustainability in HEIs has been dominated by research on piecemeal approaches around operational or educational activities [9], often documenting them in a descriptive and atheoretical way [10]
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