Unmasking Corporate Sustainability at the Project Level: Exploring the Influence of Institutional Logics and Individual Agency

Corbett, Jacqueline; Webster, Jane; Jenkin, Tracy A.

doi:10.1007/s10551-015-2945-1

Cited by 54 publications

(89 citation statements)

References 86 publications

(136 reference statements)

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“…Individuals who initiate, promote, or implement change toward sustainable development are usually called sustainability change agents (Davis & Boulet, ; Heiskanen, Thidell, & Rodhe, ; van Poeck, Læssøe, & Block, ; Weerts et al, ) and sustainability, environmental, or “social” champions (Andersson & Bateman, ; Corbett et al, ; Visser & Crane, ). They can come from various levels of the company or from outside of the company, such as project employees, CSR managers, or external consultants (Carollo & Guerci, ; Corbett et al, ; Hoppmann, Sakhel, & Richert, ; Lozano, ). Change agents perform various tasks; for example, they use their influence on internal networks to generate and diffuse cross‐departmental knowledge (Siebenhüner & Arnold, , p. 344), identify environmental issues or generate ideas, package, that is, frame and present them, attractively, and sell them to organizational decision‐makers (Andersson & Bateman, , p. 549).…”

Section: Theoretical Background and Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the absence of ready‐made structures for the implementation of sustainable development, change agents play pivotal roles in sustainability‐related organizational learning and change processes (Siebenhüner & Arnold, , p. 350). Individuals must challenge organizational inertia (Carollo & Guerci, ); however, temporal and contextual dimensions influence championing (i.e., acting as a change agent; Corbett, Webster, & Jenkin, ). The role of individuals in sustainability integration, considering the contextual factors, is addressed by the second research question (Aguinis & Glavas, ; Corbett et al, ; Siebenhüner & Arnold, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Individuals must challenge organizational inertia (Carollo & Guerci, ); however, temporal and contextual dimensions influence championing (i.e., acting as a change agent; Corbett, Webster, & Jenkin, ). The role of individuals in sustainability integration, considering the contextual factors, is addressed by the second research question (Aguinis & Glavas, ; Corbett et al, ; Siebenhüner & Arnold, ). RQ2: Who are the sustainability change agents, and how do they promote change processes for sustainability? …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sustainability management emergence and integration on different management levels in smaller large‐sized companies in Austria

Kiesnere

Baumgartner

2019

Corp Soc Responsibility Env

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Companies should integrate sustainability into all organizational units and on all management levels to contribute to sustainable development. This study explores nine smaller large-sized companies (revenue between €50 and €300 million, at least 250 employees) from various sectors. We applied the framework of Baumgartner for corporate sustainability/corporate social responsibility empirically and used the promotor model of Witte from innovation management in the context of sustainability. The findings show that companies must have (a) top management support and (b) an open organizational culture regarding sustainable development to integrate sustainability on operational, strategic, and normative management levels. These two prerequisites need to remain stable over time, as changes in top management and staff create new challenges in sustainability implementation. The companies have mainly implemented sustainability management from the top-down, first enlarging aspects of environmental management and human resource management and then integrating sustainability in terms of their vision and strategy. If top management does not see the need to alter the organization to address sustainability challenges, lower level managers or middle managers might take the initiative. In this case, however, only good environmental and human resources management practices are enabled. The top management blocks bottom-up implementation efforts if they are not willing to make decisions based on new values and judgement and promote change in the organization. Our case studies show that a power promoter is essential for the integration of sustainability on all organizational levels. Presence of strong power promoter allows other promoter types to act in sustainability integration. ---This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Section: Theoretical Background and Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Sustainability management emergence and integration on different management levels in smaller large‐sized companies in Austria

Kiesnere

Baumgartner

2019

Corp Soc Responsibility Env

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“…Organizational identification and the subsequent sharing of organizational values and beliefs (Pratt 1998) are linked to willingness to participate in CSR (Kim et al 2010). However, while employees often act consistently with their organization's identity (Corbett et al 2015), when individual employees' identities do not align with the organization's identity this can create tension amongst employees as well as between employees and the organization. These research findings subsequently suggest that while employees may lack connectedness to the organization, connectedness to colleagues is identified as a driver for employee engagement (Hammond 2011;Zigarmi et al 2009), which in turn may translate into cooperative and citizenship-type behaviors, such as employee CSR engagement.…”

Section: Observed Benefits Of Csr Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“It’s Like Hating Puppies!” Employee Disengagement and Corporate Social Responsibility

2018

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Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been linked with numerous organizational advantages, including recruitment, retention, productivity, and morale, which relate specifically to employees. However, despite specific benefits of CSR relating to employees and their importance as a stakeholder group, it is noteworthy that a lack of attention has been paid to the individual level of analysis with CSR primarily being studied at the organizational level. Both research and practice of CSR have largely treated the individual organization as a "black box," failing to account for individual differences amongst employees and the resulting variations in antecedents to CSR engagement or disengagement. This is further exacerbated by the tendency in stakeholder theory to homogenize priorities within a single stakeholder group. In response, utilizing case study data drawn from three multinational tourism and hospitality organizations, combined with extensive interview data collected from CSR leaders, industry professionals, engaged, and disengaged employees, this exploratory research produces a finer-grained understanding of employees as a stakeholder group, identifying a number of opportunities and barriers for individual employee engagement in CSR interventions. This research proposes that employees are situated along a spectrum of engagement from actively engaged to actively disengaged. While there are some common drivers of engagement across the entire spectrum of employees, differences also exist depending on the degree to which employees, rather than senior management, support corporate responsibility within their organizations. Key antecedents to CSR engagement that vary depending on employees' existing level of broader engagement include organizational culture, CSR intervention design, employee CSR perceptions, and the observed benefits of participation.

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“…We encourage researchers to assess sustainability outcomes using standard measures such as the most recent revision of the Global Reporting Initiative's environmental issues (e.g. recycling, energy efficiency, biodiversity, reduction of products' and services' environmental impacts: see Corbett et al (in press) for an example).…”

Section: Looking Forward: Directions For Future Research and Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Editorial: Special issue on empirical research on information systems addressing the challenges of environmental sustainability: an imperative for urgent action

Elliot¹,

Webster²

2017

Information Systems Journal

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Unmasking Corporate Sustainability at the Project Level: Exploring the Influence of Institutional Logics and Individual Agency

Cited by 54 publications

References 86 publications

Sustainability management emergence and integration on different management levels in smaller large‐sized companies in Austria

Sustainability management emergence and integration on different management levels in smaller large‐sized companies in Austria

“It’s Like Hating Puppies!” Employee Disengagement and Corporate Social Responsibility

Editorial: Special issue on empirical research on information systems addressing the challenges of environmental sustainability: an imperative for urgent action

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