Integration and organizational change toward sustainability

Introduction

As more organizations elevate sustainability to a strategic priority, the challenges associated with executing these activities have intensified. At the same time, there is a research gap in understanding how integrated systems leverage financial, social, and environmental benefits. We need to understand how sustainability is operationalized. This article explores who is involved in integrating sustainability initiatives by focusing on two main questions:

1. What do sustainability professionals in leading companies do to operationalize sustainability practices in their organizations?

2. How does the ever-changing sustainability paradigm affect the evolution of management systems and decision-making?

There are many explanations for the gap between intention and implementation. By focusing on sustainable development and the transition to a sustainable society, it helps us see that sustainability itself must be the ultimate goal. However, the language around sustainability, organizations, and initiatives is confusing. Conflicting definitions of sustainability and vague claims about environmental or efficiency practices suggested as “sustainable” add layers of confusion. For most organizations, leveraging sustainability for corporate advantage invokes the cliché: it’s easier said than done:

“As sustainability grows in importance, capturing its full value becomes more challenging, perhaps because the more companies prioritize sustainability, the more the core business needs to be integrated (and even changed).”

State of the Art

Despite the large number of academic articles and reviews published on corporate sustainability, confusion persists about why and how companies engage, assess progress, and signal their commitment to sustainability goals. […] In an attempt to eliminate the confusion surrounding sustainability, one objective of this article is to establish which corporate leaders are recognized in sustainability for putting activities into practice within and across organizations. This approach makes it possible to assess how and why sustainability affects management systems, integration efforts, and decision-making.

The level of “integration” is a sustainability construct that is often overlooked in management systems and the design of change management and, as such, presents opportunities for scale development and further empirical validation. For the purpose of this article, “integration” broadly describes activities related to environmental and social sustainability, including the actual processes of procurement, management, decision-making, measurement, and reporting related to the company’s resources used to create value. This definition recognizes that integration is fundamental to the vertical and horizontal alignment of sustainability activities, as well as performance measurement across many dimensions.

Drivers of change and evolving systems

Understanding the integration of sustainability management and organizational change involves a range of external and internal drivers. Integrated management systems, transparency, and the resulting data provide a foundation for sustainability and organizational change and set the context for the role of management professionals—namely, sustainability professionals responsible for managing the integration movement.

The drivers that help us understand how and why organizations integrate sustainability are dynamic. These drivers are motivated both externally and internally. External drivers include, among others, organizational reputation, customer demand for transparency, regulation, social awareness, access to resources, and collaboration with external parties. Institutional theory suggests that organizations pursue legitimacy by conforming to external isomorphic pressures in their environment; it has been reported that drivers vary widely by company size, structure, and industry, and that transparency drivers include compliance, competitive advantage, innovation, environmental responsibility, and social factors such as stakeholder demands.