Abstract
To facilitate organizational change and improve corporate sustainability, this study identifies change agents and factors driving sustainability integration in the core business of companies. The survey on corporate sustainability management in Austria, with focus on smaller large-sized companies (revenue of €50–300 million, at least 250 employees), fills the research gap between studies commonly concentrating on the largest companies and on SMEs. Companies mainly established integrated cross-departmental sustainability management teams, which required change in the routines of employees and change agents to drive the projects. Possible locations of these change agents were identified. We drafted a process model that visualizes how change agents multiply their impact on the organizational level through interaction. The main sustainability implementation drivers are rooted in personal and organizational values, e.g., organizational culture and personal interest; the main inhibiting factors are the lack of resources or locked-up resources, originating from organizational inertness and other barriers to change. Companies can reduce the barriers by, e.g., providing extra resources in role and routine adaption phases and creating incentives to use sustainability-related skills. Austrian companies focus on established environmental and energy management topics. To implement themes that do not necessarily bring financial return, adopting paradox perspective on tensions between conflicting objectives might be useful.
Highlights
Increasing resource use and environmental impacts that are associated with an increasing global population and accelerating development have made it obvious that “business as usual” is not good enough to achieve a sustainable future [1,2]
Additional drivers and barriers for sustainability integration and change, as summarized by, for example, Aguinis and Glavas [19], Engert, Rauter and Baumgartner [20] and Lozano [13], were included while drafting the research design. As both human and non-human factors were identified in the existing literature that are essential for sustainability management and sustainability integration in organization, the following research question was developed: RQ: “Who or what drives the integration of sustainability in the core business of the company?”
In our study we found that smaller large-sized Austrian companies need change agents to drive sustainability activities and control/motivate other employees, since sustainability projects include diverse organizational units in all project phases
Summary
Increasing resource use and environmental impacts that are associated with an increasing global population and accelerating development have made it obvious that “business as usual” is not good enough to achieve a sustainable future [1,2]. The variety of activities that company managers view as sustainability projects is very broad, without reconsidering the core meaning of sustainable development and the fundamental function of organizations, sustainable development work will continue to suffer from ‘reductionism’, ‘problem displacement’ and ‘problem shifting’ in terms of time, space and knowledge transfer [8] Companies will not be able to contribute to sustainable development without changing the underlying business logic
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