Towards Sustainability: Examining the Drivers and Change Process within SMEs

Dunphy's Sustainability Phase Model

This article is a treasure trove. 

"This paper provides a thorough literature review of the current stage of the development of such frameworks, as well as a comparison with assessments of where 21st century corporations stand with regards to sustainability."

• In the 2010 Sustainability and Innovation Global Executive Study (SIGES) (MIT, 2011) of 3,000 executives, 57% reported that pursuing sustainability-related strategies is necessary to be competitive. This study labeled 24% of the respondents as “embracers” when in addition to seeing sustainability as necessary to be competitive they also reported their organization as having a business case for sustainability and reported it as a permanent part of management’s agenda. These embracers see themselves as outperforming their competitors (70%) and report their organizations’ sustainability related actions have increased their profits (66%).

• Because change is difficult, especially on an organizational level, Lueneburger & Goleman (2010) indicate that their research shows that sustainability initiatives evolve through three distinct phases: in the first phase the systemic challenge is to create the sustainability vision; the second phase is to translate that vision into action; and in the third phase the organization anticipates future needs. 
• Demartini et al. (2011) present an extensive literature search on sustainable management of SMEs, from which they conclude that at present there exists no convincing evidence that sustainability strategies now being used by large companies are viable for SMEs, and that therefore a great deal of research needs to be done, because of the large numbers of SMEs.

• Howard-Grenville (2006), however, provides compelling evidence that internal factors are also important drivers of corporate action with respect to environmental sustainability, and that even organization sub-cultures can have distinct impacts on what the corporation overall decides to do or not do. The author states that “[a]ttending explicitly to what an organization’s culture and subcultures are, not what they ought to be, and how these cultures shape interpretations and action, should yield insight into a more complex picture of the motivators and practices of corporate environmental management.”(p.47). This argues strongly for the use of qualitative research methodology, at least in the beginning, in order to avoid being “fed” the official line rather than the actuality of what the driving cultural attitudes towards sustainability are in the organization, and who/which groups within the SME, if any, actually have the power to take the organization to the next “wave.”  

A large portion of the article is a discussion of the following:

As noted in the previous section, research on organizational change has typically been focused on large-scale organizational change. One such model is Kotter’s Eight Stage Process of Creating Major Change (Kotter, 1995). This model states that there are eight stages that an organization must move through, and that each stage must be adequately addressed if the desired change is to occur and become part of a new operating environment. These steps include: 

1) Establishing a sense of urgency    

2) Creating the guiding coalition   

3) Developing a vision and strategy  

4) Communicating the change vision  

5) Empowering broad-based action  

6) Generating short-term wins 

7) Consolidating change and producing more change   

8) Anchoring new approaches in the culture   

  

The general observations that most change efforts do not succeed is echoed in the field of sustainability, with most experts in agreement that progress towards sustainability has been modest at best (Doppelt, 2003). In examining what goes wrong with organizational efforts to move towards sustainability, Doppelt (2003) has identified what he terms “seven sustainability blunders”. These include: 

1) Patriarchal thinking that leads to a false sense of security 

2) A “siloed” approach to environmental and socioeconomic issues 

3) No clear vision of sustainability 

4) Confusion over cause and effect 

5) Lack of information 

6) Insufficient mechanisms for learning 

7) Failure to institutionalize sustainability 

Sloan, K. Klingenburg, B. Rider, C. (2013). Towards Sustainability: Examining the Drivers and Change Process within the SMES, Journal of Management and Sustainability, 3(2), 19-30.