Toward a sustainability organizational culture model

Abstract

The relationship between organizational culture and corporate sustainability initiatives and practices, such as cleaner production, is widely recognized, yet little is known about an organizational culture conducive to sustainability. Cleaner production entails managing the physical aspects of production and transforming the organization's culture. However, the existing research primarily investigates a corporate culture that focuses on enhancing productivity. While research on sustainability-productive culture is scanty, it concentrates on the cultural level of artifacts of sustainability practices, leaving much unknown about the deeper cultural levels of conscious and unconscious assumptions and beliefs that constitute the essence of organizational culture. The present study aims at discovering cutting-edge knowledge on sustainability-productive organizational culture. It adapts the Integrated Systematic Literature Review framework to identify scholars from the Scopus database who have played a significant role in creating the knowledge base and their documents during the past 27 years. As a result, relevant descriptive statistics of the collective body of knowledge, two schools of thought, influential scholars, and methodological issues are derived from the literature. Two frameworks on sustainable cultural transformation and sustainability organizational culture are derived from the cutting-edge knowledge, as informed by the work of the recognized key scholars. These frameworks highlight the hitherto unacknowledged importance of a normative grounding in cultural assumptions and values, delivering cutting-edge knowledge in the field of sustainability organizational culture. Research, theoretical and managerial implications from the review are also discussed.