Kent D. Fairfield

Influences on the organizational implementation of sustainability: an integrative model

Multiple forces in the 21st century have propelled businesses into confronting conditions that challenge their own and the worlds sustainability. This paper illuminates the factors influencing companies to implement sustainability practices. It validates an integrative model of the effects that external influences, foundational organization enablers, decision drivers, and inhibitors had on both sustainability implementation and organizational performance. Using data from a worldwide survey of 1514 managers, we showed how external forces for sustainability and support from organizational leaders to create an enabling foundation are likely to translate into decision priorities, implementation of sustainability practices, and perceived performance improvement. We also showed the considerable power of internal inhibiting forces and outlined how they may be overcome. The results point to the steps leaders can take to achieve their environmental, social, and financial goals, as well as to further streams of inquiry.

Growing Up and Growing Out: Emerging Adults Learn Management Through Service-Learning

This article describes a journey introducing service-learning based on large-scale projects in an undergraduate management curriculum, leading to supplementing this approach with more conventional small-group projects. It outlines some of the foundation for service-learning. Having students undertake a single class-wide project offers distinctive advantages. The difficulties experienced in early iterations of the course, however, prompted the author to reflect on the literature on developmental psychology and “emerging adulthood.” This reflection led to introducing a second course based on more modest small-group projects, which can serve as a useful prerequisite for the more ambitious class-wide project enterprise. The smaller scale project class focuses on personal skills, individual effectiveness, and team leadership. Moving later to a larger scale project allows students to learn more about delegating to others, managing performance, designing tasks and organizations, and gaining a sense of impact as a collective unit. Results so far suggest the benefit of both classes taken in sequence.

Teacher as Judge or Partner: The Dilemma of Grades Versus Learning

Students are socialized to value grades, sometimes more than learning. Although many teachers are devoted to a learning-centered approach, others signal by their actions a deep-set interest in grading. The authors used a 2 × 2 matrix to analyze potential matches and mismatches between teacher orientation and student orientation. The implications of the mismatches are discussed. The authors suggest dealing with the dilemma by making learning and grading mutually supportive, thus creating a more effective learning environment.

Understanding Functional and Divisional Organizational Structure A Classroom Exercise

Most management students have had limited exposure to issues concerning organizational structure. This exercise offers a brief in-class experience of the differences of working in a functional structure versus a divisional structure. The instructor guides students to think about certain events, or challenges, confronting their simulated organization. Some of these challenges are best handled by a functional organizational structure, while others are much more taxing if organized that way. Conversely, a divisional organization can produce agile responses to certain initiatives but poses difficulties in coordinating across multiple divisions. Students can begin to sense how structure exerts a major influence on decision making.

Relative effect of geographic context and international strategic approach on sustainability management

Organisations around the world are increasingly factoring in environmental and social demands as they strive to achieve enduring success beyond near-term financial returns. Only partially understood are the ways that organisations manage sustainability based on geographic location and multinational standardisation. This study analysed a worldwide survey of managers (N = 1,514) to compare across borders their perceptions of sustainability-related external influences, internal inhibitors, internal enabling factors, decision drivers, practices, and operating performance. Guided by an existing integrative model combining these factors, this paper analysed variation across geographic region, country-wide sustainability conditions, and level of economic development. Corporate sustainability motives, practices, and benefits do vary significantly across geographic contexts, but organisation size and strategy of operating as a national, multi-local, or global firm make an even bigger difference. Further research is suggested to deepen these findings.

Educating for Change in Mindset and Worldview on Sustainability: One Teacher’s Story

Organizations around the world have become increasingly concerned about managing for sustainability. Educating undergraduates about sustainability presents the challenge of dealing with students with limited knowledge, politicized awareness, and modest understanding of business and sustainability issues. Traditional-aged students are at a stage of deriving their own worldview on many subjects, including their place in a broader world. Equipping them to be useful professionals in the future, or even specializing in sustainability-oriented careers, requires raising their awareness of the state of the world in environmental, societal, political, and business terms. A curriculum needs to get them acquainted with what the world needs to reach a more fruitful future, as well as the strategies that the business sector can pursue for that purpose. This study reports one professor’s attempt to create a comprehensive pedagogy to produce highly qualified graduates and support them in acquiring a mindset and worldview that includes cognitive skills, fundamental values, and confidence to make an appreciable impact toward a sustainable planet.