Marriage Between Sustainability and Business Strategy in Organizations: What Is the Role of HRM (and HRD) and Communication?
摘要
The evolving debate on sustainability or environment, social, and governance (ESG) has attracted a phenomenal attention of, inter alia, researchers, business managers, and stakeholders of international organizations. Having done a gap-spotting by reviewing the past studies, this chapter is ambitious of answering three research questions: (a) how the sustainability, as a business function/department, is organized and how it is linked with business strategy with the concern for governance? (b) how the sustainability function/department is staffed and what competencies are required of employees to facilitate building the link between sustainability and business strategy?, and (c) how the sustainability function/department carries out intra-organizational communications in linking sustainability and business strategy? In view of the nature and form of these research questions, the researcher employed case study as the research strategy. The fieldwork for gathering empirical data was conducted at three large business organizations in Sri Lanka. Ten participants contributed to in-depth interviews conducted by the researcher, i.e. eight in-person and two online interviews. The theoretical lens for this study draws upon upper echelons theory developed by Hambrick and Mason. Some findings of the study are consistent with past studies, while others making a new contribution to advancing the debate. Emphatically, these findings are not empirically generalized to a larger population of business organizations.