Competences for Environmental Sustainability: A Systematic Review on the Impact of Absorptive Capacity and Capabilities

Abstract

Responsible management competences are the skills of managers to deal with the triple bottom line, stakeholder value and moral dilemmas. In this paper, we analyse how managers develop responsible management competences and how the competences interact with capabilities at the organisational level. The paper contributes to the responsible management literature by integrating research on absorptive capacity and organisational learning. By creating intersections between these disparate research streams, this study enables a better understanding of the development of responsible management competences. The paper is a systematic literature review on environmental competences, which are a type of responsible management competences referring to the managerial skills aimed at improving environmental sustainability. The findings demonstrate that managers who are able to recognize and acquire external knowledge develop environmental competences, and organisations capable of assimilating, transforming and exploiting knowledge develop environmental capabilities. The paper establishes that a dynamic and recursive relation exists between environmental competences and capabilities. Antecedents and contextual conditions specific to a sustainability context, such as eco-centric values and stakeholder pressures, influence the development of environmental competences. The study shows that environmental competences have a positive direct effect on environmental performance, and an indirect effect as a mediator between environmental capabilities and performance.

A Literature Review of Inter-Organizational Sustainability Learning

“…The keywords in each category are selected in line with previous studies. For instance, for learning keywords such as knowledge development, knowledge acquisition, knowledge absorption, are also searched in line with prior studies in the field [10,89]. For sustainability, keywords such as green and eco-friendly, or social responsibility are used to cover the broad literature in the field.…”

“…These articles were screened based on two sub-processes: inclusion of articles only from relevant research fields, and exclusion of articles which contain the search string but in a different context. First, as an inclusion criterion, the following four Science and Social Science Index categories are selected to provide coverage of journals that are both in the business and management and sustainability fields [10]: Green and Sustainable Science Technology, Environmental Studies, Management and Business. Application of this inclusion criterion yielded a sample of 1655 articles.…”

Constellations of Transdisciplinary Practices: A Map and Research Agenda for the Responsible Management Learning Field

“…Montiel et al (this issue) review the corporate sustainability literature and synthesize threshold concepts to translate academic insight into conceptual knowledge that is adequately packaged to change managers' mindsets fundamentally. Dzhengiz and Niesten (2019) conceptually integrate individual and organization level learning for sustainability by reviewing the literatures of environmental competences and capabilities.…”

“…For instance, both papers Dzhengiz and Niesten (2019) and Montiel et al (this issue) stayed within the environmental sustainability discipline on all fields. Establishing intersectorality in these conceptual papers appeared more difficult than in empirical papers.…”

“…Establishing intersectorality in these conceptual papers appeared more difficult than in empirical papers. However, for instance, Dzhengiz and Niesten (2019) established intersectorality on the educational field as they studied phenomena related to absorptive Fig. 4 Constellations of transdisciplinarity in contributions to this special issue capacity, which is concerned with organizations' ability to relate to 'outside knowledge' from distinct sectors.…”