Corporate Sustainability: A View From the Top

Abstract

Through a qualitative approach (via semistructured interviewing), we explore the perspective of 72 CEOs of companies operating in Portugal about the definition of corporate sustainability (CS) and its facilitators, and obtain four main findings. First, most CEOs equate CS with the company's continuity/viability. Second, the relevance ascribed to different stakeholders differs considerably: while more than 50 % of CEOs cited shareholders/profits, and more than 40 % mentioned the natural environment and employees, very few mentioned customers, society, suppliers, the State, or competitors. Third, the management practices considered as most important to develop CS are (a) the organization's strategic alignment with a long-term orientation, and (b) developing and energizing people within a positive organizational climate characterized by trust and ethics. Fourth, the leadership characteristics and behaviors considered as most important to foster CS are scrutinizing the future and leading people through a mobilizing vision; energizing and developing employees; and leading by example. While the whole picture is largely consistent with the ''sustainable strategic management'' (SSM) approach suggested by Stead and Stead (2014) and with recent CS integrative approaches, the great majority of CEOs who participate in the study have not embraced such integrative and coevolutive perspectives.

Assessing Corporate Sustainability with Repertory Grid Based Personal Construct Psychology

“…Only in 2,8% of the personal constructs of the interviewed people are linked to corporate sustainability relevant topics like societal influence, environmental impact or organizational culture (Rego et al, 2015). This finding leads to a rejection of hypothesis 2 that the personal constructs of the investigated research subject reassure the relevance of sustainability in business operations and strategy.…”

CSR and the Supply Chain: Effects on the Results of the SME

“…Related to the three typical dimensions of CSR (economic, social, and environmental), and following the perspective of the triple bottom line [17], green/environmental issues have dominated research until recently [12,27,76]. How-ever, we should not forget the existence of the social and economic aspects.…”

“…Green innovation is able to ensure both environmental sustainability and economical profitability [77,104,105]. Moreover, some authors relate a good reputation with a company's ability to obtain profitability [76,106,107]. Finally, a positive image could generate profitability for companies, and in this sense the literature presents numerous cases [21,107,108].…”

Management Solutions to Determine the Level of Management Culture Aiming to Implement Corporate Social Responsibility

“…not always directly [4][5][6][7][8][9]. There is even a bigger lack of scientific researches suggesting managerial solutions for organizations aiming to implement corporate social responsibility, which is indirectly analyzed in the works of various authors [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], and there is a particular lack of researches related to both CSR and management culture [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30].…”