Improving the Sustainable Development of Firms: The Role of Employees

Abstract

Stakeholders have been found to be an important driver of organizations' sustainable development. In particular, customers, governments and non‐governmental organizations push firms towards sustainability. But to what extent is sustainability really and deeply embedded within an organization's structures and processes? And what is the role of an important, but frequently neglected, stakeholder group for successful sustainability implementation: employees? The objective of this research is to better understand the impact that organizational change for sustainability has on firm performance. Also, this study seeks to understand how the consideration of employees into the process of organizational change for sustainability moderates the organizational change and performance relationship. Using data from 92 German companies from the manufacturing and services sector, the study finds that the structural implementation of sustainability is positively related to firm performance and that employee integration moderates this relationship to some extent. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Linking Employee Stakeholders to Environmental Performance: The Role of Proactive Environmental Strategies and Shared Vision

“…Employees often initiate and assume responsibilities for environmental management activities, and in many instances possess unique knowledge of their firms, which may enable them to support firms towards environmental improvements (Boiral, 2002;Sarkis et al, 2010;Wolf, 2013). As pointed out by Delgado-Ceballos et al (2012), one of the most significant barriers to the success of proactive environmental strategies is a lack of both environmental awareness and environmental values among employees, even more than the lack of financial resources (Hillary, 2004).…”

“…In addition, firms that initially focus on internal stakeholders are able to develop capabilities and embed these in their routines before engaging external stakeholders effectively (Tang et al, 2012). A second reason may be that employees draw on their unique knowledge of firms (Sarkis et al, 2010;Wolf, 2013) to promote environmental improvements, which can be viewed as necessary for firms' survival. Finally, it is also possible that the stakeholder groups controlled for in our study have a more significant influence on different types of strategies.…”

“…In order to maximise the cooperative potential of employees (Savage et al, 1991) in furthering environmental strategies, middle and top-level managers play a critical role not only in enabling bottom-up communication, but also in supporting employees' efforts throughout the various levels and departments of firms (Cantor et al, 2012). If employee expectations and actions as environmental stakeholders are recognised, employee motivation may increase, resulting in the creation of a virtuous cycle (Ramus and Killmer, 2007;Sarkis et al, 2010;Wolf, 2013). The Co-operative, for example, boosts its energy-saving programme with regular communications highlighting the progress against targets, and regional competitions that reward star performers with in-store parties (Earley, 2013a).…”

One Rule to Rule Them All? Organisational Sensemaking of Corporate Responsibility

“…Accordingly, CR must be championed by a firm's top managers to develop successful CR programmes (Del Brio et al 2008;Duarte, 2010;Hemingway and Maclagan, 2004;Wu et al, 2015). Top management holds the primary responsibility for integrating responsible processes into the organisation's everyday activities (Weaver et al, 1999: 550); therefore, managers must align employees by creating shared meanings and rules through training (Wolf, 2013), and management processes must facilitate employees' ability to learn (Demuijnck, 2009;Ramus and Steger, 2000). In this regard, organisations' reliance on topdown processes and common rules is unsurprising: several management standards, especially environmental management standards such as ISO 14001 and EMAS, require managerial control and commitment.…”

“…A vast majority of these scholars have seen a solution in the establishment of shared organisational rules that are expected to result in a unanimous organisational understanding of CR (Baumgartner, 2009;Benn and Martin, 2010;Haugh and Talwar, 2010;Siebenhuner and Arnold 2007;Tudor et al, 2008;Wolf, 2013). More specifically, the rules of CR are to be managerially created, promoted in a top-down manner and finally implemented across organisational units and members.…”