Abstract

     The relationship between organizational culture and corporate sustainability initiatives and practices, such as cleaner production, is widely recognized, yet little is known about an organizational culture conducive to sustainability. Cleaner production entails managing the physical aspects of production and transforming the organization’s culture. However, the existing research primarily investigates a corporate culture that focuses on enhancing productivity. While research on sustainability-productive culture is scanty, it concentrates on the cultural level of artifacts of sustainability practices, leaving much unknown about the deeper cultural levels of conscious and unconscious assumptions and beliefs that constitute the essence of organizational culture. The present study aims at discovering cutting-edge knowledge on sustainability-productive organizational culture. It adapts the Integrated Systematic Literature Review framework to identify scholars from the Scopus database who have played a significant role in creating the knowledge base and their documents during the past 27 years. As a result, relevant descriptive statistics of the collective body of knowledge, two schools of thought, influential scholars, and methodological issues are derived from the literature. Two frameworks on sustainable cultural transformation and sustainability organizational culture are derived from the cutting-edge knowledge, as informed by the work of the recognized key scholars. These frameworks highlight the hitherto unacknowledged importance of a normative grounding in cultural assumptions and values, delivering cutting-edge knowledge in the field of sustainability organizational culture. Research, theoretical and managerial implications from the review are also discussed.

Introduction

     Organizational culture has been emphasized as a way to integrate sustainability within an organization in cleaner production (e.g., Leite et al., 2019; Li and Hamblin, 2016) and strategic management literature (e.g., Bansal and Song, 2017; Engert et al., 2016). Cleaner production involves not just managing physical aspects of production but also transforming the culture and attitudes of organizational members (Leite et al., 2019; Vieira and Amaral, 2016). While a robust organizational culture is widely regarded as fundamental to cleaner production initiatives (Leite et al., 2019; Vieira and Amaral, 2016) and sustainability enterprises (e.g., Avery, 2005; Baumgartner, 2009; Ketprapakorn and Kantabutra, 2022), our knowledge of sustainability-productive culture is limited. Existing research on organizational culture tends to concentrate on the culture that enhances productivity (Paais and Pattiruhu, 2020; Turner, 2017) rather than sustainability (e.g., Avery, 2005; Baumgartner and Zielowski, 2007; 2009; Ketprapakorn and Kantabutra, 2022).

     Sustainability-productive organizational culture is defined as shared assumptions, values, and beliefs about sustainability that shape the behavior of an organization through its decision-making and practices (Ketprapakorn and Kantabutra, 2022). This definition is based on Schein’s multilayered cultural framework, which consists of three levels: underlying assumptions and beliefs, norms and values, and artifacts that reflect these (Chatman and O’Reilly, 2016; Schein, 1985).

Conclusions

     We have presented the growth trajectory, volume, and distribution of the SOC literature and identified the most influential authors and documents on SOC. The SOC field has continued to grow. The most influential SOC authors are Griffiths, Baumgartner, Gunasekaran, Jabbour, Lozano, and Kantabutra. There are two most influential documents on SOC: “Organizational learning to manage sustainable development” by Siebenhüner and Arnold (2007); and “Organizational culture and leadership” by Baumgartner (2009). It is clear from both author and document analyses that the research interest among SOC scholars has been on how to integrate sustainability in business organizations. Although they have addressed the integration at different cultural levels, the cultural level of shared basic assumptions is the most lacking. We have also pointed out the methodological issues in the existing SOC knowledge base.

     Through the co-citation analysis, we have also shown the intellectual structure of the current SOC literature. It comprises four schools of thought on SOC: (1) organizational culture, leadership, and change; (2) corporate sustainability strategy and management; (3) technological innovation in sustainable manufacturing and supply chain; and (4) frameworks and methods.