What can Industrial Change Agents Teach us Corporate Sustainability Theorists?

Companies need to address their impacts on the sustainability of society to achieving long-term success. To satisfy current demands while simultaneously being prepared for tomorrow's developments entails a dynamic capability... [ view full abstract ]

Companies need to address their impacts on the sustainability of society to achieving long-term success. To satisfy current demands while simultaneously being prepared for tomorrow's developments entails a dynamic capability and management of organisational change. In the implementation process of Corporate Sustainability (CS), physical and social dynamics of business activities play an important role. Scientific research however generally focuses on optimizing physical dynamics in the CS implementation process, discarding the influence of the created and affected social dynamics. This article therefore focuses on optimizing  social dynamics in the CS implementation process. Three literature analyses were carried out, analysing to what extent the propositions made by scientists to optimize  social intervention dynamics in the CS implementation process correspond with literature written by successful CS change agents from the industry and what lessons can be drawn from this comparison .

It is found that firstly, a leader centred approach  seems to be most successful when initiating the corporate cultural change necessary to optimize the social dynamics within the company. Leaders can mould a corporate culture for it to help optimize the social intervention dynamics resulting from the CS implementation process. For companies that did not start from a CS perspective it is observed that the corporate culture needs strong leader centred guidance to enable and establish cultural change for a longer period of time. Habits need to be broken and employees need to be convinced of the new vision, which takes more dedication and effort of a leader than when a company starts from a CS perspective, and the leader can simply recruit people that fit to the vision. Once, the moulding process of the corporate culture has matured the leader can take a step back and become more observing, trusting his employees to have enhanced the corporate values and to be capable of acting within the set vision. Depending on the level of risk that is considered acceptable, a leader can either guide corporate cultural change through channelling or accepting ambiguity. Channelling ambiguity entails that there are several value dimensions on which everyone within the company agrees. Here, cultural change happens as a result from different cultural backgrounds of employees. Accepting ambiguity means a lot of innovative freedom is granted to employees by keeping evaluation criteria vague.