J. Alberto Aragón-Correa

The Influence of Stakeholders on the Environmental Strategy of Service Firms: The Moderating Effects of Complexity, Uncertainty and Munificence

Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, we examine how complexity, uncertainty and munificence in the general business environment moderate the association between a firms stakeholder integration capability and its environmental strategy. Our data were drawn from 134 ski resorts in 12 countries in western Europe and North America. Our study finds that (1) an organizational capability of stakeholder integration is associated with a service firms adoption of a proactive environmental strategy; (2) an uncertain business environment has a direct positive influence and a complex business environment has a direct negative influence on a firms environmental strategy; and (3) complexity has a negative moderating influence on the relationship between a firms stakeholder integration capability and its environmental strategy.

Proactive Environmental Strategies and Employee Inclusion: The Positive Effects of Information Sharing and Promoting Collaboration and the Influence of Uncertainty

The organizational literature has often acknowledged that under certain conditions, corporations should limit the information that employees receive and how they interact to improve corporate financial performance. The present article criticizes the logic of such corporate restrictions. Data obtained from 164 pharmaceutical firms operating in 27 different countries support the positive implications of inclusive and collaborative human resources practices. Our results reveal positive and significant relationships between the practices of information sharing with employees and promoting employee collaboration and the development of a proactive natural environmental strategy for a firm. In addition, this research tests the moderating role of general environment uncertainty in these relationships. Contrary to expectations based on contingency theory, uncertainty does not appear to moderate these results for the sampled firms.

Greenwashing in Corporate Environmentalism Research and Practice: The Importance of What We Say and Do

Barely a month goes by without another high-profile firm being accused of misleading communications about environmental activities or performance. Already in 2014, Nestle has been called to account for promoting its customized recycling program for Nespresso disposable coffee pods, which has only a negligible overall waste reduction impact. Unilever has been subjected to a Twitter campaign alleging that its partnership with The Guardian newspaper to host a sustainable living online engagement platform did not accurately reflect the firm’s true environmental impacts. The frequency of similar problems, the high profile of the organizations involved, and the potentially damaging implications for the credibility of managers and researchers of organizations and natural environment motivated us to devote this collaborative editorial to the research frontiers and implications of corporate greenwashing, illustrating some of our ideas with the articles in this issue. Greenwashing is the selective disclosure of positive information without full disclosure of negative information so as to create an overly positive corporate image (Lyon & Maxwell, 2011). Greenwashing is a central empirical phenomenon within organizations’ interactions with the natural environment because it is hard for stakeholders to directly evaluate firms’ environmental performance. This leads to a reliance on firms to signal their environmental quality through environmental reports, advertising, corporate websites, or eco-certification schemes. Increased environmental disclosure without obvious substantive improvements in environmental impacts has fed justifiable skepticism about the gap between what firms say and do on environmental issues (e.g., Dauvergne & Lister 2010; Forbes & Jermier, 2012; Konefal, 2013). Increased environmental disclosure has also provided research questions and empirical data for scholars to analyze greenwashing behavior, its drivers, and its consequences (e.g., Delmas & Burbano, 2011; Du, 2014; Walker & Wan, 2012). In her book After Greenwashing: Symbolic Corporate Environmentalism and Society, Frances Bowen (2014) argues that the less sophisticated forms of greenwashing may be declining due to a combination of increased stakeholder vigilance and the flattening of information symmetries through new data and monitoring technologies, while the broader symbolic dimensions of corporate environmentalism are becoming even more pervasive. Activists have launched inventive ways to expose greenwash, such as posting and rating examples of greenwash (see www.greenwashingindex.com) or categorizing it into different types of “corporate sins” (TerraChoice,

Advancing Research on Corporate Sustainability – Off to Pastures New or Back to the Roots?

Over the last two decades, corporate sustainability has been established as a legitimate research topic among management and organization scholars. This introductory article explores potential avenues for advances in research on corporate sustainability by readdressing some of the fundamental aspects of the sustainability debate and approaching some novel perspectives and insights from outside the corporate sustainability field. This essay also sketches out how each of the six articles of this special issue contribute to the literature by going back to some of the conceptual roots of sustainability and/or by offering novel perspectives for research on corporate sustainability. As these six articles and the outlook on future research opportunities show, broadening the inquiry of corporate sustainability in terms of topics, theories, and methodologies holds considerable potential to improve our understanding of how decision makers and organizations respond to sustainability.

Inter-departmental collaboration and new product development success: a study on the collaboration between marketing and R&D in Spanish high-technology firms

This research paper presents an analysis model formed by 12 hypotheses containing predictions about the influence that collaboration between the RD thus, allows us to make a significant contribution to the issue under analysis. The hypotheses have been verified empirically with a sample of 104 Spanish firms belonging to various high-technology activities. The results obtained support the proposed hypotheses and highlight the relevant role of variables related to organisational climate as opposed to that of variables associated with organisational structure. The influence of business context factors has also proved to be important for final results.

Toward Cognitive Plurality on Corporate Sustainability in Organizations: The Role of Organizational Factors

There is a growing body of literature that looks into the role of individual decision-makers’ cognition and interpretations of corporate sustainability issues for understanding corporate responses to sustainability. At the same time, the sustainability strategy of many firms is dominated by a business case approach that marginalizes alternatives views and interpretations of organizational members on sustainability issues. More adequate responses to sustainability challenges might require that firms allow for a greater plurality of views among organizational members to trickle up and inform corporate decision making on sustainability. We argue that such a cognitive plurality on sustainability in organizations can be generative for sustainability strategies but depends on a range of organizational level factors such empowerment, team participation, corporate climate, and decentralization. Cognitive plurality will also emphasize emergent strategy formation and the acceptance of tensions and conflict around different sustainability views. We encourage future research on corporate sustainability to further investigate the role and importance of cognitive plurality.

Can Ecolabels Influence Firms' Sustainability Strategy and Stakeholder Behavior?

Ecolabels are policies and programs that are designed to signal information to stakeholders about a product’s attributes and reduce stakeholder uncertainty about the validity of green product claims. However, for ecolabels to be successful at addressing information asymmetries external stakeholders must perceive them as being credible. We assess the prospects of different sorts of ecolabels to influence firms’ sustainability strategies and stakeholder behavior based on the credibility of their institutional construction. We then describe important areas for future ecolabel research, and analyze connections between these future research areas and the articles that form this issue. Finally, we emphasizethe importance of collaborative stakeholder initiatives in advancing sustainability strategy and how accurate information is vital to the success of these initiatives.

Big Data, Management, and Sustainability Strategic Opportunities Ahead

We contend that big data and management for sustainability are very good bedfellows, in that many of the affordances big data provides are naturally aligned with sustainability concerns (e.g., multidimensional nature, collective actions, smart allocation of resources, efficiency priority). Notwithstanding this promising stepping off point, and the enticing analytical opportunities that an abundance of data will generate, we provide some reflections on big data and the most promising avenues of research it might inspire in the field of management and sustainability. In the first part of our essay, we explore what managers can do with big data to reinforce organizational sustainability and how different operational, strategic, and corporate activities are affected in this process. In the second part, we focus on what big data allows researchers to explore and examine, ranging from sustainability job descriptions through environmental metrics to industry transformation. We conclude by advocating for strong theoretical orientation in research on and with big data.

Job‐related skill heterogeneity and action team performance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on job‐related skill heterogeneity and action team performance by considering that team members may differ in the levels of their job‐related skill, as well as in the way their job‐related skill is spread over the different dimensions of the task.Design/methodology/approach – Data were used from 30 National Basketball Association (NBA) teams collected over 21 seasons (1986/1987 through 2006/2007). The total number of team‐seasons analyzed was 584.Findings – A positive relationship was found between job‐skill level heterogeneity and action team performance that declines as average job‐skill level in the team grows. Furthermore, action teams showed poorer performance when their members with a low job‐related skill level have a high specialization.Practical implications – From the practical perspective, it is of special interest to an action team manager to know that job‐related skill heterogeneity has a positive influence on team performance – mainly when the ...

The Relationship Between High Performance Work Systems and Proactive Environmental Management

The first five chapters discuss various aspects of sustainable entrepreneurship. This is followed by two chapters that look at innovation within existing firms.