Organizational Sustainability Practices: A Study of the Firms Listed by the Corporate Sustainability Index

Alamo Batista,Antonio Francisco

doi:10.3390/su10010226

Alamo Batista, Antonio Francisco

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su10010226

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Jan 17, 2018
Citations: 95	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná

Abstract

Organizational sustainability (OS) has been guiding the decision-making process of managers in order to generate competitive advantage. This paper aims to identify the sustainable practices performed by large corporations in the implementation of OS. Reports with actions performed by large organizations and their reach in the three pillars of sustainability—environmental, economic, and social dimensions—are disclosed to their main stakeholders, based on short, medium and long-term sustainable goals. These reports often reflect the progress of OS or the progress made toward them. However, few studies investigate the sustainable practices adopted by firms and their reproducibility. A search was performed in reports selected from the firms listed by the Corporate Sustainability Index (CSI) from 2012–2016, belonging to the Brazilian stock market in services sector of the economy and employed the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) methodology. The results showed the strategic planning involving infrastructure, environment, human resources, product innovation, organizational management and deadline setting acted as the baseline for the implementation of the practices found. The findings will guide the managers´ decisions in the development of their strategic planning, based on practical and objective results.

Highlights

This paper aims to identify the practices performed by firms recognized by third parties as sustainable in environmental, economic, and/or social dimensions
This paper followed the methodology proposed by [49] and the stages were followed: (1) Developing a review of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) sustainability reports (2) Structuring a classification system for the areas approached by Organizational sustainability (OS) (3) Mapping the results found in the classification system (4) Identifying the results of the report analysis according to the classification (5) Analyzing the results and suggesting future works
The criteria for searching and selecting the reports in the GRI database were: (1) service sector firms listed by the Corporate Sustainability Index (CSI) in the 2012–2016 period; (2) identifying which of those firms published their reports according to GRI guidelines; (3) reports published in English

Summary

Introduction

This paper aims to identify the practices performed by firms recognized by third parties as sustainable in environmental, economic, and/or social dimensions. Siew [2] conducted a review regarding the main methodologies employed to assess sustainability. Amui et al [3] focused on the dynamic and needs of sustainability and [4] on the quality of the corporate sustainability reports. This paper complements those works with a holistic view of the system through the analysis and assessment of the main sustainability categories, observing the recognized practices performed by large, corporations that are acknowledged as being sustainable. OS has become prominent in the day-to-day of firms due to the several stages included in its implementation and operationalization [10]

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