The role of management development in achieving a culture change towards sustainability in the organisation

The role of management development in achieving a culture change towards sustainability in the organisation

The role of management development in achieving a culture change towards sustainability in the organisation

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Management Development, Volume 32, Issue 3.

For many years CEOs of both major companies and international organizations such as the UN have talked about, or even put on a pedestal, the topic of sustainability as an inevitable challenge to change, as well as an imperative to change. The message has been set out forcefully and credibly. Yet, for many a temporarily good reason, but usually for no reason at all, implementation in the organizations themselves only takes place incidentally – though there are of course a selection of good exceptions.

Sustainability is still a subject that seems multi-interpretable. For many managers it may have something to do with CO₂, ecosystems, temperatures, pollution – all subjects far from what normally concerns them. Or so they think. Much more research is needed, much more needs to be done to change attitudes and behaviour in the place of work to make companies sustainable, and make companies responsible for their sustainable future. Training and developing managers and introducing them to this mindset is absolutely necessary.

Sustainability implementation is in its infancy. In terms of Rogers’ diffusion of innovations curve, we might posit that among managers, only innovators and a small percentage of early adopters are now engaging with sustainability, but that the large majority has yet to engage (Rogers, 1962).

Global mega trends

An increasing number of global megatrends is shaping the contemporary business, political and societal landscape: demographic change, globalization, shifts in the centres of economic power to include emerging markets, climate change and ecosystem degradation, to list those most frequently cited. Differentials in the quality of life and resource scarcity are inescapable challenges which inevitable changes have brought with them (Rockström et al., 2009; Dobbs et al., 2011).

In this environment, “sustainable development” is increasingly being adopted as a helpful narrative which provides a set of principles to make sense of these connected global facts and trends and to guide our political and business responses. Writing in the New York Times in June 2012, the twentieth anniversary of the first Rio Earth Summit, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon described sustainable development as no less than a new economic model:

Twenty years ago, there was the Earth Summit Gathering in Rio de Janiero, where world leaders agreed on an ambitious blueprint for a more secure future. They sought to balance the imperatives of robust economic growth and the needs of a growing population against the ecological necessity to conserve our planet's most precious resources – land, air and water. And they agreed that the only way to do this was to break with the old economic model and invent a new one. They called it sustainable development (Ban, 2012b).

Ten years ago, CEOs tended to believe that the principles of sustainability added nothing but cost to their business. Now the situation is radically different as a critical mass of business leaders increasingly sees sustainability becoming one of the battlegrounds of competition within their sector and a significant source of both opportunity for and risk to long-term competitive advantage. As an illustration of this change in mindset, in an address to Tomorrow's Company in London on 15 November 2012, Robert Swannell, Chairman of Marks & Spencer plc stated that sustainability was part of its core business and that “doing good does us good” (Swannell, 2012).

The United Nations Global Compact-Accenture (2010) CEO study similarly shows that 93 per cent of CEOs believe sustainability will be critical to the future success of their companies. In all, 80 per cent believe a tipping point where sustainability is embedded in the core business strategies of most companies will be reached within the next 15 years and 54 per cent believe this tipping point could occur within the next decade (UN Global Compact and Accenture, 2010).

As over the past decade this significant shift in thinking has occurred at this level, the need for change in organizational culture has increasingly been recognized. Ashridge's 2009 study for the United Nations PRME, with EABIS, showed that 92 per cent of CEOs and senior executives believed change in organizational culture was required to effectively address the challenges and opportunities of sustainability (Gitsham et al., 2009).

To a certain extent, the changes observable over the past decade mirror developments in the academic literature, as there is an increasingly well-developed body of literature on the nature of the challenges around sustainability. What is still lacking is a well-developed body of literature on the implications for practice within organizations, the “how to” experiences and recipes and the actual changes that need to take place. Hence, “while the Beta sciences have provided much technical advice and solutions, the Gamma sciences are failing to provide the research for implementation” (Winsemius, 2010).

AIRC2 2011: link between sustainability-driven change and management development

It was in recognition of this growing interest in and need for a change in organizational culture towards sustainability that Ashridge Business School devoted its 2nd AIRC International Research Conference to this theme (the Ashridge International Research Conference, AIRC2), held in June 2011, and chaired by the Guest Editors of this Journal of Management Development (JMD) special issue. The conference was organized around the core questions “How to deal with the sustainability challenge in the organisation? How to balance short term priorities with long term vision, organisational change with stability, strategic goals with day-to-day implementation, domestic with international responsibilities”, “What can we learn from experiences so far about how culture change for sustainability really happens in organisations?” (Millar and Gitsham, 2010) and attracted a committed international group of academics and business leaders, excellent papers and discussion from scholars and practitioners working on this question around the world.

One theme that emerged at the conference was that, as this sustainability-driven need for organizational culture change had become recognized, the subject of management development appeared closely linked. This echoed what a couple of years earlier was proffered by a critical mass of business leaders who came to the view that management development and learning – within their own organizations as well as across business schools and professional institutes – had a critically important role to play in how they lead organizational change to effectively respond to the sustainability challenge (Gitsham et al., 2009).

Of vital importance is how business schools and management development in general could better prepare future leaders to address these matters. An issue that needs to lead to a new interpretation of both factual and emotional data and may enable leaders to develop new ways of thinking and new business models which will ensure the sustainability of their businesses. As an example, Hind et al. (2009) argued that sustainable businesses need leaders who are pro-actively aware of their social and environmental responsibilities as well as their financial ones and suggested that for the development of “responsible” leadership the intellectual capacities of reflection, synthesis and integration of local and global business information must be fostered. Another example of a way to get executives from awareness to action might be an analogy with the AIDA mnemonic – a by now tried and tested concept related to the pattern by which marketing ideas could be communicated, leading to the action of purchasing (Bartels, 1988). AIDA stands for Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action, and describes the stages effective communication goes through: should management development similarly address awareness, interest (through knowledge and the rational component) and desire (and the emotional component), and would this lead to responsible and engaged action? It is often argued that it is the experiencing of the need for sustainability (as for instance offered to managers in IBM who take part in their corporate service corps management development training programme) that leads to action, but we posit that knowledge, engagement and a strong belief in the necessity of change for sustainability may also promote action.

Will management development indeed be able to help? We believe it can – in spite of the fact that globally there are many differences in management development requirements, and in spite of the fact that there are many tools and approaches to management development that as yet have not been fully and universally evaluated for relevance and optimal performance at whichever stage of sustainability development the company is.

Rio+20 Earth Summit 2012: focus on management education

This growing agreement on the significance of management development for sustainability is again underlined by the attention this subject received at the 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit. Such was the prominence given to discussions on the role of education for sustainable development, and management development in particular, that government negotiators included the following three agreements in the final outcomes document from the summit:

We resolve to promote education for sustainable development and to integrate sustainable development more actively into education beyond the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.

We strongly encourage educational institutions to consider adopting good practices in sustainability management on their campuses and in their communities, with the active participation of, inter alia, students, teachers and local partners, and teaching sustainable development as an integrated component across disciplines.

We underscore the importance of supporting educational institutions, especially higher educational institutions in developing countries, to carry out research and innovation for sustainable development, including in the field of education, and to develop quality and innovative programmes, including entrepreneurship and business skills training, professional, technical and vocational training and lifelong learning, geared to bridging skills gaps for advancing national sustainable development objectives (United Nations, 2012, pp. 44-45).

This focus on education and management development for sustainability during the Rio negotiations was achieved not least by the efforts of the higher education sustainability initiative, coordinated by five different UN bodies with an interest in education: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), United Nations Academic Impact, The United Nations Environment Programme, The United Nations University and The United Nations Global Compact Principles for Responsible Management Education.

In his remarks to the UN General Assembly following the Rio+20 summit, Secretary General Ban Ki Moon also emphasized the importance of this agreement on education for sustainability:

The Higher Education Sustainability Initiative attracted hundreds of endorsers and commitments from 250 universities in about 50 countries. This initiative is transformative, global in reach and could reach thousands of graduates from universities and business schools (Ban, 2012a).

Integration of sustainability in management development curricula

Scholars have stepped up to this challenge, leading work to build our understanding of the different approaches available for introducing management development for sustainability: how to design new curricula; how sustainability can be integrated into existing courses across different disciplines at under-graduate, post-graduate and executive levels; the different pedagogical approaches that can be employed. Over the last decade a number of special issues exploring these matters have been published by the Journal of Management Education (Egri and Rogers, 2003; Rusinko and Sama, 2009), the Journal of Teaching in International Business (Mintu et al., 1993), Business Strategy and the Environment (Springett and Kearins, 2005), the Academy of Management Learning and Education journal (Starik et al., 2010) and Corporate Governance, the international Journal of Business in Society (Lenssen et al., 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010). And this current special issue of JMD is follows in this tradition.

There has been intense interest in how the principles of sustainability can effectively be woven into each of the traditional business disciplines that are the mainstay of the conventional business school MBA curriculum: such as strategy, finance, marketing, operations, supply chains, innovation, human resources. And a number of initiatives has been established to explore such questions, such as the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS), the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative (GRLI) and the United Nations Global Compact Principles of Responsible Management Education. Yet, many serious issues remain under-researched, such as “What are the strengths and weaknesses and differing societal outcomes of value-based management versus stakeholder-led approaches to strategy development?” “How do our ways of thinking about measuring organisational performance – the core of the finance and accounting curriculum – need to evolve?” “What do managers now need to understand about integrated reporting, carbon accounting, and other ways of measuring ‘stakeholder value’ created?” And “what do they need to understand about the innovations that are happening in the way we measure performance at the level of nation states, with the advent of GDP+ measures, happiness indices, and different ways of valuing natural capital?” Similar questions abound in the fields of marketing, operations, human resources and across all disciplines of management.

Thus while there has been considerable interest in new pedagogical approaches too that seek to achieve learning outcomes through combining personal inquiry, experiential learning and active reflection, our own emerging research suggests that it is critical to combine cognitive learning with powerful, first hand, emotional engagements in order to move from awareness raising to the kind of commitment to doing things differently that genuinely helps create organizational change (Gitsham et al., 2012; Gitsham, 2012), and we feel strongly that this work needs to be extended.

Areas for further research

Summarizing, as the number of management development institutions (business schools, professional bodies, in-house learning functions and corporate universities) offering management development that addresses sustainability grows, there is now a need for more work in three important areas:

1. 1.

   The role of management development: first, as we have discussed, corporate leaders and others increasingly assert that management development has a key role to play in stimulating organizational change for sustainability, but what is the evidence from practice about the impact management development can have on this dimension of organizational change? What can we learn from those examples where management development for sustainability is taking place about the impact it might be having on organizational change? What are the relative merits of standalone management development programmes for sustainability, vs integrating a sustainability focus across the mainstream management development curriculum? Where we are mainstreaming sustainability into management development curricula, is it making a difference? What are we learning from practice about the kind of change in mindsets and behaviours? Which approaches are leading to the most effective outcomes? Are management students who learn about sustainability going on to lead such change in organizations? What do we know about the impact of management development for sustainability on MBA graduates? How is this influencing their career choices and behaviour as leaders? What outcomes are in-house corporate learning programmes for sustainability achieving, and what can we learn from this?

2. 2.

   Approaches and tools for management development: second, what do we know about organizational change for sustainability within the institutions that organize management development professionally (whether these be business schools, professional bodies and institutes or in-house corporate learning functions and corporate universities)? In those business schools that have effectively begun mainstreaming sustainability through the development of new curricula, what factors stimulated and supported this organizational change? What is really effective at encouraging school administrators, course leaders and teaching faculty to embrace sustainability? What are the dynamics of organizational politics at play? Why has this kind of change happened in some business schools and not in others? What are the barriers to this kind of organizational change within business schools taking place, and how have some institutions overcome these? What is Business Schools’ own record in the PRME field?

3. 3.

   Business Schools and the sustainability curriculum: third, what theoretical models or conceptual analyses could summarize and provide actionable guidelines for business schools and other institutions to perfect their pedagogy, e.g. not just teach about sustainability but affect understanding and implementation.

This special issue

This special issue of the JMD makes a contribution to various gaps in areas of research and looks at the essence, constraints and opportunities for management development to play a role in changing the culture of organizations and changing the mindset of managers to more intensely engage in sustainability. This would also mean including sustainability in day-to-day management and operations. And second looks at how business schools could start-kick the process through curriculum and teaching development in the institutions. It seeks to build on this emerging body of scholarly work and move the debate forward.

To echo these three streams of thought we have organized the papers in our final collection into the following groups – all in the field of management development and the sustainability-driven need for culture change in the organization:

• •

  Two research papers about the role of management development;

• •

  One research papers and two case studies about the various approaches and tools management development could use; and

• •

  One research paper and two case studies about how business schools could embed sustainability in their curricula.

In the next few pages we are giving an overview of these papers.

Part 1 – The role of management development

Our first paper, by Sanne Frandsen, Mette Morsing and Steen Vallentin (University of Southern Denmark/Copenhagen Business School), “Adopting sustainability in the organization: managing processes of productive loose coupling towards internal legitimacy” is a critical inquiry into existing research and practice on sustainability adoption illustrated by two corporate vignettes. They question the often taken for granted assumption that adoption of sustainability is a process characterized by alignment and integration towards consensus, and that awareness creation mechanisms are the most important means to secure organizational support and thus internal legitimacy, i.e. employee support and co-ownership, for corporate sustainability efforts. Instead, they suggest that a loosely coupled approach to sustainability adoption is a productive way to understand internal legitimacy construction, as it appreciates complexity and polyphony.

The second research paper is by US/Nigeria team Craig L. Pearce, Charles C. Manz and Samuel Akanno, entitled “Searching for the holy grail of management development and sustainability: is shared leadership development the answer?” They reviewed the literature and developed a theoretical model of the connection between leadership and sustainability. Arguing that most treatments of sustainability focused on glorifying top executives for their sustainability efforts or vilifying them for their lack thereof the authors claim that this perspective is oversimplified and flawed; instead their model focuses on the active engagement of employees at work and they propose that broadening management development across all levels of organizations, along the lines of shared leadership theory (Pearce and Conger, 2003) will facilitate organizational sustainability.

Part 2 – Approaches and tools for management development

In Part 2 we are looking at tools and approaches for management development in implementing a decision towards more sustainability, and have grouped here three papers, one research paper and two case studies.

The first case study is by Ashridge's Gill Coleman: “Sustainability as a learning challenge” which involvingly reports and reflects on a decade-long action experiment to devise a form of business education for sustainability that helps managers act as “pro-sustainability” agents of change. It offers one example of practice in this evolving field, for scholarly scrutiny and discussion. It is an innovative educational experiment that has much wider significance for how managers are helped to bring about pro-sustainability change. On the basis of this work, the challenges of business education for sustainability are becoming clearer, but not easier to deal with. There is a vast gap between the strong and urgent imperatives brought about by the damage we are inflicting on our planet, and the awareness of the need for significant change (Doppelt, 2010). The Ashridge MSc is both a business education programme for sustainability whilst simultaneously acknowledging that the managerialist assumptions underpinning this aspiration are part of the problem that change for sustainability needs to address. Gill Coleman has tried to show us how resistance to change pervades the discourse through which we understand and respond to the questions we are trying to address – the tacit framing and behaviour through which we conduct educational processes.

The next case study is by Nicolas Ceasar and Nadine Page, also from Ashridge, on “A time and place for sustainability”. They describe a management development intervention, facilitated by two consultants, to support the leaders of a multi-national organization to make sense of sustainability through experiential dialogue and engagement. Participants from different communities and organizations convened to develop an open and challenging framework for discussion. The intervention supported participants to discuss and engage with sustainability and allowed them to increase their understanding and vision at both a personal and organizational level. Success factors included developing a solid contract between the consultant and client, the role of trust, sufficient time, open but goal directed facilitation skills, location congruence and being away from usual routines. What it tells us is that in order to really come to terms with sustainability challenges, leaders need to make time to step away from their daily routine, and relocate to a different place where they can challenge their current cognitions, values and beliefs, and immerse themselves in a different perspective altogether. HR and L&D specialists need to continue to push for dialogue and emergence in supporting their managers to make sense of the complex yet critical issues of sustainability.

The last paper in this second part of the special issue is by a multi-national team of authors, from Israel, Australia and France: Gil Bozer, James C. Sarros and Joseph C. Santora on “The role of coachee characteristics in executive coaching for effective sustainability”. Coaching is an area of management development that is growing fast, – as also witnessed by the programmes at Ashridge – and the powers and potential of this tool, as well as its negatives, are becoming clearer through research. In this paper a non-randomized controlled trial research design was used to examine the hypothesized relationships among coachee characteristics and executive coaching effectiveness as reflected in greater levels of individual outcomes in corporate Israel. The research provided greater insights in the type of individual outcomes executive coaching should achieve, and under which conditions coaching is likely to be beneficial for participants. Being better able to design and implement coaching programmes to drive sustainable development and innovation is the contribution of this paper.

Part 3 – Business schools, management development and sustainability

In this last part of the special issue we are focusing on what can be done by and in business schools, and illustrating this through three powerful contributions: two case studies and one research paper. The research paper compares and contrasts the methods two PMRE universities used to incorporate sustainability in the curriculum, followed by a case study about a multi-institutional programme designed to prepare students for management positions in a number of companies. Last but not least, the final paper is a case study on how one whole management school tackled the issue of change for sustainability in its own organization.

The first paper in Part 3 is a research paper by Denise Baden and Carole Parkes (Southampton/Aston) who researched “Experiential learning: inspiring the business leaders of tomorrow”, in which two different approaches are discussed as taken by two UK signatories to the UN Principles of Responsible Management Educations (PRME) – where in one university MSc Entrepreneurship students are opting for placements with social enterprises, and at the other university MBA students undertake workshops using “live” case studies. The analysis reveals that the opportunity to work with social entrepreneurs and/or “responsible” business professionals provides the business students with inspirational role models and positive social learning opportunities. A great contribution of the paper is to examine, by drawing on social psychological research related to behaviour change, how experiential learning on traditional business masters programmes can provide students with the knowledge, motivation and skills to contribute positively to society in a way that more traditional pedagogies cannot.

Our second piece in Part 3 is a case study by Marsha A. Dickson, Molly Eckman, Suzanne Loker and Charlotte Jirousek, from Delaware, Colorado State and Cornell Universities, the USA, who present “A model for sustainability education in support of the PRME”. This unique multi-institutional programme focuses on management education occurring outside the business school, an extension of faculty resources through inter-institutional collaboration, and use of the internet for course delivery using innovative strategies to promote sustainability-focused education designed to prepare students for management positions in global apparel and footwear companies. This way, faculty built a shared vision of sustainability education, identified learning outcomes, developed practical and applied learning experiences and created tools to assess learning and industry experts agreed that the courses and learning outcomes were important and addressed industry needs: an excellent example for other educational institutions for how to negotiate institutional factors in pursuit of the UN PRME.

Last but certainly not least is a case study by the Cranfield team of Nadine Exter, David Grayson and Rajiv Maher: “Facilitating organisational change for embedding sustainability into academia: a case study”. This paper aims to capture, codify and communicate an implicit change-management process to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability at the Cranfield School of Management. The implicit change-management process had unconsciously mobilized a variety of tactics identified in the change-management literature; a more explicit articulation of the “as-is” and “desired” states, and a more explicit, systematic and regular communication of the journey and goal, might have enabled faster progress. However, the nature of a highly autonomous and decentralized organization like an academic institution means that sustainable change-management may be slower than in commercial institutions. Though the authors may have been closely engaged in the change-management process they describe and inevitably have unconscious biases and partial perspectives, we believe that as a frank and self-critical account of a five-year-plus process, it can assist other academic institutions tackling how to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability into its research, teaching, advisory services and its own operations.

Finally

This is a perfect time for the interplay of management development, culture change in the organization and the sustainability agenda to be discussed and analysed in this special issue of the JMD. In commercial organizations the question of how managers in organizations respond to the global trends connected with sustainable development is becoming more and more urgent, and is growing as a focus for academic study and debate, with a particular interest in how organizations change their culture to embed sustainability, and how this can be achieved. This is the reason why attention is being paid to the connections between management development and sustainability. We hope and trust that this special issue of the JMD makes a valuable contribution to this very live debate.

The role of the guest editors of this special issue has been to solicit provoking and high-quality submissions and stimulate improvements, respecting the strict requirements of quality peer reviewing, putting together the final collection and facilitating authors achieving quality output. The editors have not edited or rewritten the papers, which are all the authors’ own, the authors’ sole responsibility and there for you to ponder on and take forward. We thank all the authors for their cooperation, inspiration and diligence in helping us deliver this special issue.

We trust that this special issue will inspire you into action – into practice, or into further research – and that this special issue will not be the last one that will appear in JMD on the subject of change and sustainability. With you we are looking forward to the next one – which we trust will be even richer in research and practical experiences and more directional in advice.

We wish you an enjoyable read.

Carla CJM MillarAshridge Business School, Berkhamsted, UK and Department of International Marketing & Management, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands

Matthew GitshamAshridge Business School, Berkhamsted, UK

Acknowledgements

The Guest Editors would like to thank the team of wonderful reviewers without whom this Special Issue would not have materialised. They also want to express their great appreciation of Mrs Eileen Mullins, whose devotion and warm personality will be sadly missed after her untimely death.

Further reading

Repko, R. (2012), Tijdschrift voor Marketing, 12 November

About the Guest Editors

Professor Carla CJM Millar is a Fellow at Ashridge, Distinguished Professor of International Marketing & Management at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and a Partner in Management Partners Consultants. Her research interests are in international marketing and strategy, KIBS, services innovation, leadership and management and sustainability, ethics and governance issues. She is an active Ambassador for the advancement of women in academic careers, served for many years as member of the Board of the Netherlands Network of Female Professors, and of the Advisory Board of the Dutch Knowledge Centre for Non-Executive directors, as Secretary of AIB UK, and Treasurer of the Academy of Marketing, UK and is a member of the editorial board of several academic journals. Previously she held appointments as Dean of TSM Business School, CEO of City University Business School's Management Development Centre, Professor at the University of Groningen, Visiting Professor at ANU, Canberra and the University of Maribor, Slovenia, after a career with Unilever, Bowater and Ferranti. She holds a BSc in Economics and an MA in Public Policy from Tilburg University, an MPhil from the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Europeennes in Turin and a PhD in IB from City University, London. She has published in, for example, JMS, BJM, MIR, JBE and JOCM. She guest-edited Special Issues of the International Journal of Advertising (on advertising in Europe), Journal of Business Ethics (on leadership and global ethics), the Journal of Public Affairs (on unethical leadership) and the Journal of Organisational Change Management (on sustainability driven organisational change). Some of her books are: Emergent Globalisation (2005), Knowledge Entanglements (2006), Ethical Leadership, Global Challenges & Perspectives (2010). She is a Fellow of the Ashridge Centre for Business and Sustainability, a Visiting Professor at the University of Chester, and a Fellow and a Life Member of the Academy of Marketing. Carla Millar is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: Carla.millar@ashridge.org.uk

Matthew Gitsham is Director of the Ashridge Centre for Business and Sustainability at Ashridge Business School. He works with colleagues across the Ashridge faculty to promote thought leadership around organisational change, leadership development and sustainability. He has recently led research exploring CEO perspectives on the implications of sustainability for leadership development, in partnership with the Academy of Business in Society (ABS) and the United Nations, and sponsored by Shell, Unilever, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft. He is currently leading a major research study “Leading organisations of tomorrow” exploring examples of innovation in leadership development in a changing global context at IBM, HSBC, Ernst & Young, IMC Group, Bovis Lend Lease, InterfaceFLOR and Sky. He teaches on a range of Ashridge executive and Masters programmes, including the MBA. He is widely published and a frequent contributor to industry and academic conferences. He is an elected member of the academic board of ABS and is co-leader of the United Nations PRME Working Group on Leadership and Sustainable Development. He was awarded the 2010 “Rising Star” award as part of the Academy of Business in Society-Aspen Institute European Faculty Pioneer Awards, made annually to honour European Business School faculty who “demonstrated great vision and outstanding leadership in integrating the principles of sustainable development into research, education and learning, student communities and corporate practice”.