This chapter provides an explorative analysis of cultural factors critical to the sustainable organisational developments within cloud environments. The chapter examines how businesses could improve their sustainability by creating sustainable cultures. The chapter debates sustainability issues such as the relationship between organizational culture and sustainable organisational developments. The chapter provides a list of key areas for creating a sustainable culture, for instance, the Change readiness assessment, Leadership and management support, Stakeholder involvement, and Education, as well as Communication. The chapter also discusses organizational culture and the close relationships between culture and sustainability. The chapter examines the relationships when creating sustainability culture and the key factors that will influence the change process.
TopIntroduction
Achieving long-term sustainability has gained a significant importance by various industries, warehouses and service facilities. In addition, surge in global warming and depleting natural resources have also emerged as significant factors.
Most literature suggests that sustainability could be classified in three different sustainability systems, namely: Economic sustainability, Environmental sustainability and Social sustainability. Economic sustainability requires firms to ensure optimum utilisation of space. On the other hand environmental sustainability requires firms to ensure their environmental damage or polluting conduct are minimised. While social sustainability requires firms to include various factors such as employee job satisfaction and better working conditions (Khalili, 2011). Social sustainability also addresses poverty and human development issues while the environmental sustainability is the predominant prerequisite for social sustainability.
This chapter focuses on cultural sustainability and in particular its role in improving firms’ overall sustainability. The chapter explores how a strong organizational culture will help create corporate sustainability and the link between them.
Social innovators create novel solutions to social problems (Lawrence, Phillips and Tracey, 2012). According to Kanter (1999) “Innovative companies reap the benefits of first mover advantage”. However several leading organisations have identified immense opportunities in engaging sustainability programmes. They have also learned that finding solutions to sustainability problems could bring enormous growth potential to their business. Business analysts can contribute towards development of entrepreneurs and innovators who could develop technologies and products to find solutions for sustainability problems. Management education can play an important role in this by nurturing staff to become sustainability entrepreneurs and create value through sustainability innovation. The organisational culture needs to be ready for embarking on sustainability initiatives.
Building a Culture of Change towards Sustainability
To achieve effective organisational cultural change towards sustainability in organisations, it is critical to adhere to the following three principals:
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Ensure that the participants’ level of understanding of sustainability issues and challenge assumptions are clear.
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Align the sustainability initiatives with the business model.
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Establish an ongoing multidisciplinary team for driving sustainability initiatives.
Experience has shown that it is necessary for the organisation to build its teams to implement the sustainability initiatives. To avoid disappointment of implementing sustainability initiatives, the transformational models should be appropriate for the firm and realistic to suit the operational environments, within a realistic time frame to make change happen.
However, most organisations are often not equipped to deal with the complexity of sustainability problems and solutions. Therefore, leaders need to draw on inter-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder sources of information and develop skills for strategic decision making within emergent, uncertain environments such as supply chains.