Managing Corporate Sustainability with a Paradoxical Lens: Lessons from Strategic Agility

Corporate sustainability introduces multiple tensions or paradoxes into organisations which defy traditional approaches such as trading-off contrasting options. We examine an alternative approach: to manage corporate sustainability with a paradoxical lens where contradictory elements are managed concurrently. Drawing on paradox theory, we focus on two specific pathways: to the organisation-wide acceptance of paradox and to paradoxical resolution. Introducing the concept of strategic agility, we argue that strategically agile organisations are better placed to navigate these paradox pathways. Strategic agility comprises three organisational meta-capabilities: strategic sensitivity, collective commitment, and resource fluidity. We propose that strategically agile organisations draw on strategic sensitivity and collective commitment to achieve organisation-wide acceptance of paradox, and collective commitment and resource fluidity to achieve paradoxical resolution. For each of these meta-capabilities, we identify three organisational practices and processes specifically related to corporate sustainability that organisations can leverage in pursuit of strategic agility. We offer a conceptual framework depicting the strategic agility meta-capabilities, and associated practices and processes, which organisations draw on to successfully manage corporate sustainability with a paradoxical lens.     

Strategic Outsourcing: Lessons from a Systems Integrator

This article explores the question of how outsourcing works in practice. 'Telequip', a telecoms equipment supplier, adopted a core competency strategy under which activities outside its 'core business' of order fulfilment were to be outsourced. Detailed research on three of the outsourcing decisions which flowed from this strategy, including attending meetings between Telequip and its suppliers, led the author to conclude that in practice it wasn't all as neat as that. He argues that Telequip used its core competency strategy to get rid of problem-ridden business activities and that outsourcing risks loss of key skills.     

Managing Corporate Networks from America to China

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are making a major contribution to China's economic development. This analysis examines how eight prominent American MNCs are handling the process of linking the management of their China joint ventures into their global structures. It looks at how the MNCs are addressing the tensions that arise between maintaining control in terms of their worldwide standards while attempting simultaneously to adapt to the complex and dynamic environment of China. The reconciliation of these requirements depends on a relatively few focal actors, who are located at critical interfaces within the MNCs' internal networks between the China joint ventures and the corporate level.     

Industry Specific Sustainability Benchmarks: An ECSF Pilot Bridging Corporate Sustainability with Social Responsible Investments

This paper investigates the state of the art with respect to sustainability reporting, its linkages with the corporations, internal measurement and monitoring systems and their combined impact on the quality of contemporary sustainability benchmarks, developed by SRI analysts and so-called rating and screening agencies. This research originated from the EU-funded research initiative to create a new generation management framework for corporate sustainability and responsibility (CS-R). The aim of it is to develop a coherent set of assessment –, measurement – and monitoring tools. The sustainability benchmark tool should align the interests of corporations implementing CS-R and various organizations supporting SRI, such as fund managers, analysts and screening agencies. This paper show the essentials features of an actual sustainability benchmark which is currently under construction. This approach will have significance impact on the further development of SRI and CS-R practices, as well as support the development of sustainability reporting standards.     

Managing Perplexity: Lessons from Inside the Romanian Business Culture

Despite the passage of several decades since the revolution of 1989, there is little professional literature designed to prepare foreign investors for the Romanian business culture. Visitors to this nation discover a friendly people who engage in business practices often characterized as perplexing, frustrating, and imbued with self-defeating actions. The communist period in Romania's history imbedded unethical behavior into the nation's culture, including the morally ambiguous practice of favor trading. This paper describes this central business activity and how it shapes business dealings and often undermines opportunities. The cultural context that created the favor trading environment is discussed, and methods for managing this perplexing practice are explained.     

Business Cases and Corporate Engagement with Sustainability: Differentiating Ethical Motivations

This paper explores links between different ethical motivations and kinds of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to distinguish between different types of business cases with regard to sustainability. The design of CSR and corporate sustainability can be based on different ethical foundations and motivations. This paper draws on the framework of Roberts (Organization 10:249–265, 2003) which distinguishes four different ethical management versions of CSR. The first two ethical motivations are driven either by a reactionary concern for the short-term financial interests of the business, or reputational, driven by a narcissistic concern to protect the firm’s image. The third responsible motivation works from the inside-out and seeks to embed social and environmental concerns within the firm’s performance management systems, and the fourth, a collaborative motivation, works to bring the outside in and seeks to go beyond the boundaries of the firm to create a dialogue with those who are vulnerable to the unintended consequences of corporate conduct. Management activities based on these different ethical motivations to CSR and sustainability result in different operational activities for corporations working towards sustainability and thus have very different effects on how the company’s economic performance is influenced. Assuming that corporate managers are concerned about creating business cases for their companies to survive and prosper in the long term, this paper raises the question of how different ethical motivations for designing CSR and corporate sustainability relate to the creation of different business cases. The paper concludes by distinguishing four different kinds of business cases with regard to sustainability: reactionary and reputational business cases of sustainability, and responsible and collaborative business cases for sustainability.     

Using Indicators to Measure Sustainability Performance at a Corporate and Project Level

More and more businesses are aligning their activities with the principles of sustainable development. Therefore they need to adapt their ways of measuring corporate performance. However, it includes issues which may be outside the direct control of the organisation, that are difficult to characterise and often are based on value judgements rather than hard data. The difficulty in measuring performance is further complicated by the fact that many corporations have a complex organisational structure, with different business streams, functions and projects.This paper has used two case studies to explore how the appropriate use of indicators can be a powerful tool in addressing the sustainability of businesses both at a corporate wide level and at a project level.     

Board Gender Diversity and Corporate Response to Sustainability Initiatives: Evidence from the Carbon Disclosure Project

This paper investigates the effect of female representation on the board of directors on corporate response to stakeholders’ demands for increased public reporting about climate change-related risks. We rely on the Carbon Disclosure Project as a sustainability initiative supported by institutional investors. Greenhouse gas emissions measurement and its disclosure to investors can be thought of as a first step toward addressing climate change issues and reducing the firm’s carbon footprint. Based on a sample of publicly listed Canadian firms over the period 2008–2014, we find that the likelihood of voluntary climate change disclosure increases with women percentage on boards. We also find evidence that supports critical mass theory with regard to board gender diversity. These findings reinforce initiatives being undertaken around the world to promote gender diversity in corporate governance while demonstrating board effectiveness in stakeholder management.     

Environmental Protection in Environmentally Reactive Firms: Lessons from Corporate Argentina

We propose a model of planned corporate environmental behaviour that emphasises the values and attitudes of managers towards the environment, environmental intentions and the context in which these intentions are formed and translated into actual performance. In particular, we focus on the extent to which environmentally reactive (as oppose to pro-active) managers influence the environmental performance of their firms. We identify the factors that mitigate or accentuate the effects of environmental “reactivism”—i.e. a mind-set shared by those who assign to the state the responsibility of protecting the environment. We generate a series of hypotheses and use structural equation modelling to test them in the context of a unique dataset of Argentinean firms. Our system’s approach to corporate environmental behaviour explains approximatively 70 % of the variation in reported environmental performance across firms while highlighting elements of the model that may potentially be influenced by policy. Amongst other things, our empirical results suggest that stakeholder pressures can be an effective tool in the development of pro-environmental attitudes (and environmental intentions in the case of small firms) and in so doing offset some of the negative effects of environmental reactivism on environmental performance. Our paper highlights a number of other important implications for the design and implementation of environmental policies that account for human managerial determinants of corporate behaviour and social factors.     

Strategic decisions in turbulent times: Lessons from the energy industry

Most of the firms currently in the S&P 500 probably will not be there in 15 years. In times of great uncertainty, managers are called upon to make the right strategic choices, preserve core businesses, and prepare their organizations for the future. How can managers make these choices when the industry is under transformation? In this article, we explore how the popular VUCA framework can help to make sense of turbulent contexts and drive the decision making of managers. We study the case of the energy industry, in which traditional business models eroded quickly and dominant players lost their positions. Based on personal interviews with the CEOs of RWE (Germany) and NRG Energy (U.S.), we analyze how these executives led transformation of their organizations. We get immersed in their decision-making processes and depict how the VUCA framework helps them to identify, map, and prepare their organizations to respond to the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in their industry. We propose a guide for executive managers to navigate through VUCA contexts, taking into account the necessity to introduce short- and long-term responses that prepare organizations and stakeholders for an uncertain future.     

Factors Associated with Strategic Corporate Decisions in Family Firms: Evidence from Sweden

By using detailed ownership data from Sweden, we investigate the factors associated with corporate investment decisions in family firms compared to nonfamily firms. We find that the family owner's portfolio diversification level is to some extent, and the use of dual‐class share mechanism by the family owner is strongly, associated with reduced corporate investment. We further demonstrate where entrenched family owners, holding dual‐class shares, canalize their firm free cash flows to: they prefer to distribute it as dividends with catering motivations. They opt to pay higher dividends over increasing corporate investment, which indicates some evidence of private benefits of control.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Value of Multinational Companies: Lessons from a Sub-Saharan African Environment

ABSTRACT

The issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an approach for businesses to independently take actions that lead to better levels of societal development as well as higher value creation for the business, particularly in developing countries has gained much advocacy. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between CSR and business value of multinational companies (MNCs) in sub-Saharan Africa. The study adopted quantitative research methodology and using multiple regression analysis, findings show that CSR can positively and significantly predict business values in the multinational subsidiaries. These values include direct (economic value) and indirect (human capital value and reputational business value). This paper therefore contributes to a novel CSR index from the perspective of business value and sustainability of MNCs in the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) environment. Thus, the paper recommends MNCs operating in Africa to enhance their social investment through their CSR strategy with the aim that CSR must not be regarded as a cost center, but an investment instrument that can accrue various dividends.     

View from Practice: Managing Effectively in Collectivist Societies: Lessons from Samba Schools and Dabbawalas

This article reviews the organizational values, recruitment, and reward policies of Brazilian samba schools and Indian dabbawalas to illustrate how their fit to local cultures results in greater productivity, engagement, and low turnover. American‐style management has spread worldwide, yet in emerging market countries such as India and Brazil, multinationals often struggle to motivate and engage their employees. The companies’ top ranks in these countries are usually dominated by English‐speaking, university‐educated elites who are comfortable with Western management techniques. But these managers can be, as the Comprador class was in seventeenth‐century China, strangers in their own land, implementing management techniques that feel foreign and inappropriate to their employees. The result is often low productivity, absenteeism, and unhappiness. However, there are organizations in both India and Brazil that achieve staggeringly high productivity and consistently strong engagement though unaware of mainstream management techniques. The samba schools of Brazil and the dabbawala lunch‐delivery system of Mumbai do this by working within local cultural norms rather than trying to impose foreign ideas about efficient management. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Erratum to: Determinants of Consumer Attributions of Corporate Social Responsibility

Philanthropic giving among leaders is often assumed to be an expression of ethical leadership in both academic and media discourses; however, this assumption can overlook the ways in which philanthropy produces and is underpinned by inequality. In order to extend current understandings of ethical leadership, this study employs a critical discourse analytic approach to examine how the link between philanthropy and ethical forms of leadership is verbally and visually constructed in the media. Based on the analysis, the article demonstrates how the construction of Australian philanthropists as ethical leaders is achieved through their representation via three paradoxical identities: Aristocratic Battlers; Caring Controllers; and Publicity-Shy Celebrities. These discourses are mediated by Australian cultural norms and serve to conceal yet ultimately reinforce social and economic inequality. The article proposes that a critical discursive approach to understanding leadership ethics can help to explore the hidden or adverse effects of ostensibly ethical practices.     

Generating Regional-Scale Improvements in SME Corporate Responsibility Performance: Lessons from Responsibility Northwest

This paper describes the research carried out into small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and corporate responsibility (CR) in the Northwest of England during Phase I of Responsibility Northwest, a partnership programme designed to significantly increase the CR of the region. By engaging with significant numbers of SMEs and SME support providers across the region, key insights were gained in three key areas:

Managing the transition to the new agile business and product development model: Lessons from Cisco Systems

Through an in-depth case study of Cisco Systems, this Executive Digest finds that companies face two broad challenges when transitioning to the agile product development model. The first is identifying and helping business units and engineering teams adopt this method; the second is developing new management practices that are compatible with and can sustain the agile development practices. Although extant literature has conducted many analyses on these two challenges, there still exist gaps in the research of the agile development method. Herein, we explore how Cisco Systems addressed these two challenges followed by a discussion of the broad implications of adopting the agile development method. This research deepens our understanding of how to adopt and lead the agile development process.     

Managing socio-political risk at the subnational level: Lessons from MNE subsidiaries in Indonesia

Within emerging markets, institutional conditions vary significantly at both the country and subnational levels. Although the extant literature recognises the types of risk faced by multinational enterprises (MNEs) in emerging markets, it has hitherto paid scarce attention to explaining how MNEs manage such risk at the subnational level. Reporting on four case studies from Indonesia, we outline how MNEs ensure their success by maintaining active relationships with a variety of non-market actors—including opinion leaders, government officials, and communities at the subnational level. In our study, we developed a conceptual framework, showcasing how MNEs can manage socio-political risk within heterogeneous institutional settings.