Corporate Sustainability and COVID-19: Analyzing the Impacts of the Outbreak

Abstract

Corporations and their sustainability efforts are affected by external concerns, such as the COVID-19 outbreak. Corporations’ sustainability driving forces have been considered to be equally by external stimuli and internal factors or mainly by internal factors, with some external stimuli. Most corporate sustainability efforts have focused on internal changes. External events, such as COVID-19, can result in the corporation disappearance. A survey was developed to investigate this phenomenon, of which 115 responses from corporations were obtained. The results show that COVID-19 changed their sustainability priorities, with the economic ones increasing, followed by the social ones, but the environmental ones decreasing considerably. Additionally, COVID-19 made corporations more aware about external stimuli on drivers for and barriers to sustainability. The results also show that employees are informed and engaged in sustainability issues, but do not receive enough training about them. The corporation system elements were affected negatively, with the exception of organizational systems that had more positive impacts than negative ones, and emerged to be the most central element. The results show that corporations must have a holistic approach, i.e., they have to consider the system elements and their connections, as well as internal factors and external stimuli (or events such as COVID-19), when addressing sustainability issues. Employees are key in this process, who need to be sustainability literate to make corporations more resilient and be prepared for future sustainability challenges.