The Key to Organizational Sustainability: Nurturing a Culture of Change

Abstract

Unless they are constructed for purely theoretical purposes, all human organizations exist in their own particular environments. Those environments are subject to change. Unless the organization accommodates the changing environment. The chances of it continuing to serve the needs of its stakeholders will diminish. At a certain point as the needs of the stakeholders of the organization will cease to be served and the organization will no longer be sustainable. When the organization ceases to be sustainable it will cease to exits in its present form. The problem of organizational sustainability has been intensively studied. The issue of organizational resistance to change has been historically approached from the perspective of militating organizational resistance to a particular change initiative. In this paper, the social and historical roots of resistance to change are explored, and a new strategy to accommodate organizational change is developed. That new strategy is to adopt and nurture a culture of change. The first step in creating an organizational culture of change is to make change an everyday expectation by adjusting the organizational structure to encourage the assumption of power, authority and creativity throughout the organization. The basic four structures of organization are surveyed, and the type of structure that has been found to be most accepting and supporting of change is the type that has come to be known as an adhocracy.

Changing Organizational Culture to Establish Sustainability

“…Nevertheless, such narrow focus will only provide limited competitive advantage because the aforementioned efficiency measures can be easily copied by competitors. Moreover, that may delay the implementation of new technologies, changes or innovation that are necessary for the success of corporate environmental management initiatives (Cameron/Quinn 2011;Vodonick 2018).…”

“…Studies have shown that clan and market cultures are not preferable to pro mote corporate sustainability (Vodonick 2018); depending on the market environment and internal and external stakeholders, firms should either adopt an adhocracy or a bureaucracy culture.…”

“…As a result of this, most organizational change initiatives fail or only enable insignificant adjustments (Narayan/Adams 2016). Studies have shown that organizational culture is among the main reasons for the failure of organizational change programs (Vodonick 2018); the implementation of tools, techniques, and change strategies alone does not ensure success of cor porate environmental management initiatives when the organizational cul ture is reluctant to change (Linnenluecke/Griffiths 2010). This is being reinforced by the common perception of Western societies and business managers that consistency, reliability, established routines, and procedures are preferable.…”

“…Moreover, after implemen ting change in a clearly defined transition phase, organizations tend to re vert to their static state of business. This can be labeled as a "freeze, un freeze, and freeze" approach on change (Vodonick 2018). However, the environ ment does not work this way; change is a permanent process.…”

Sustainable artificial intelligence: A corporate culture perspective

“…Despite mainly focusing on economic outcomes of corporate culture (change), these models support our investigation of a sustainability-oriented corporate culture, especially in drawing attention towards relevant features, including communication, values, and leadership. For example, in the context of fostering corporate sustainability, communication forms a relevant means within different types of corporate culture (Linnenluecke and Griffiths 2010) and the development of a culture that embraces change (Vodonick 2018). Within this paper, the major change considered is the use of AI in the sense of SAI for promoting the SDGs.…”