embedding sustainability in organizational culture - Network for ...

Chapter 1: 5: Introduction Building Momentum for Change
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and discussing and debating ideas contributed to an innovation-supportive and
inclusive culture.
More research needs to be done to understand how internal knowledge-sharing can
be best facilitated to support sustainability implementation.
assessment: Weakly supported
ShaRE knowlEdgE ExtERnally: Exchange information about efforts
to embed sustainability with other organizations to improve everyone’s
sustainability performance
• Participate in knowledge sharing opportunities initiated by industry
associations
• Join organizations that bring together other organizations that are
grappling with sustainability
Sharing experiences with other organizations and groups to learn more about how
they are working to solve sustainability issues has mutually beneficial outcomes.
Often other organizations are working on addressing similar sustainability
issues and asking the same sustainability questions. Acknowledging that sharing
information with competitors is not necessarily harmful is an important step.
By sharing best practices and key learnings, organizations can work together to
generate sustainability solutions (Ethical Corporation, 2009).
Clarke and Roome (1999) propose that companies engage in knowledge sharing
in order to inform, confirm and validate their own internal approaches to
sustainability. Beyond this, we were unable to find work that looked back into the
organization to think about the impact of sharing ideas with the outside world.
assessment: Weakly supported
collaBoRatE: work with other organizations to try to achieve shared
sustainability goals
• Collaborate with other organizations
• Create organizational partnerships
• Cooperate with regulators, NGOs and external stakeholder groups
Solving sustainability is, in many ways, a shared responsibility and not a competitive
race. The highly complex, multifaceted, and multi-stakeholder issues and challenges
facing organizations will require collective attention and participation to be
overcome. Making headway on sustainability issues sometimes requires more than
share information sharing. To achieve real progress on sustainability issues, it may
be necessary to work with some unlikely partners like competitors, governments or
non-governmental organizations.
Buysse and Verbeke (2003) describe how organizations with advanced sustainability
agendas often work with external stakeholders such as regulators and environmental
NGOs to develop environmental standards, or form strategic alliances with
environmental groups, or even competitors, to address complex environmental
problems. Industries can band to together to develop best practices (Adriana, 2009)
or to develop new processes (Halme, 1995). When an organization opts to take on
larger sustainability challenges by working with other organizations, it can send a
signal to those on the inside that management is serious about sustainability.
In the innovation literature, Mitleton-Kelly (2006) notes that interacting with
and listening to feedback from stakeholders enabled one organization to build the
concerns of their communities into its innovation processes.
While many researchers have explored interorganizational collaborations in the
sustainability arena, we were unable to identify any that looked at the impact of
these collaborations on the cultures of the participating organizations.
assessment: proposed but not tested