The present study develops a sustainable social enterprise model and examines relationships between corporate sustainability practices and sustainability performance outputs in a social healthcare enterprise in Thailand. Findings reveal four predictors of corporate sustainability, including Leadership, Stakeholder Focus, Resilience Development, and Sharing practices. All of them have direct and/or indirect positive effects on corporate sustainability performance outputs as measured by brand equity, socioeconomic performance and environmental performance. The study also proposes a coherent theory of Sufficiency Economy in business, build upon key theories from relevant fields. Lastly, the present study provides future research directions and managerial implications based upon the model.
The present study derives culture development practices among “sustainable” small and medium enterprises (SMEs)that adopt the Thai philosophy of the sufficiency economy. It adopts multiple data collection methods including non-participant observations made during visits to five “sustainable” enterprises, and references internal and published documents among other information about the case enterprises, including annual reports, previous studies about the companies and news reports. In-depth interview sessions were held with top management team members and employees, including CEOs or MDs, and division/functional heads. The “grounded theory” is adopted as an approach to analyze the data. The analysis reveals six emerging organizational culture development practices: identifying virtues, social and environmental responsibility and innovation as core values; leaders acting as models according to these values; growing their own managers to continue their corporate cultures; designing communication channels to emphasize the core values among employees; using the core values as criteria to recruit new employees; avoiding employee layoff to preserve the core values even in times of financial crisis. Limitations and future research directions to develop a behavioral theory of sustainability culture in organizational settings, as well as managerial implications are discussed.
While organizational resilience is widely considered as critical to sustainability, gaps in both the scholarly and professional literature exist. First, stronger conceptualization of the term is needed. Second, little is known about how organizational resilience can be continuously accomplished via daily practices and processes. Finally, the ongoing organization theory development does not sufficiently address these gaps. Contributing to the literature by filling in these fundamental gaps, the present study integrates the disconnectedly growing literature into an organizational theory of resilience. Based on the General Systems Theory, the resulting theory comprises inputs of human resources, socio-cultural values, institutional settings, and social and environmental issues, enabling organizational structure, value and belief subsystem, resilience mindset, sustainability practices, adaptive and buffering capacities, and sustainability performance as the output. Their dynamic relationships are discussed and expressed via a model and propositions, followed by implications for researchers and practitioners.
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