The last two decades has seen an upsurge in the employee unethical practices in global organisations leading to the collapse of these organisations (Pearce et al., 2013; Schwartz, 2013; Stevens & Rago, 2013). Media and news reports have highlighted numerous cases of employee ethical misconduct such as dishonesty, bribery, and cheating (Chapman & Lindner, 2016; Schwartz et al., 2005) that have undermined organisational sustainability. This high level of ethical misconduct questions the efficacy of existing ethical programs. It emphasises the importance of organisational sustainability and its social and economic impact on organisations (Lange et al., 2012; Pearce et al., 2013; Soltani, 2014). Since the last decade, organisational sustainability has emerged as a discipline, and debate on its indicators and measures has attracted the attention of researchers (Özlem & Besler, 2014). Globally, a significant number of big companies such as Enron Corporation, WorldCom, Arthur & Anderson collapsed mainly due to the lack of ethical practices among their employees (Chernov & Sornette, 2016; Stevens, 2013). These organisations suffered from low efficiency, revenue losses and bankruptcy (Arshad, 2017; Nielsen, 2010). Thus, it can be argued that the ethical lapse of a single employee may result in financial and moral damage to the entire organisation though most of the large organisations have formal codes of ethics (Weber & Wasieleski, 2013). Moreover, they also offer ethical training to their employees. Nevertheless, these programs have proven largely ineffective with unethical employee practices remaining prevalent in the organisations. This is a serious concern for organisational sustainability. In addition, employees are spiritually weak and require spiritual training to increase their awareness concerning right and wrong actions.

Organisational Sustainability

Sustainability is considered a multi-level construct, comprising individual, organisational, political-economic, social-cultural, and ecological levels. Most academics and practitioners examine how executives respond to the challenge of sustainability and survival of the organisations (Martínez et al., 2014). Sustainability is a term that has been utilised and interpreted in substantially different ways (Akhtar et al., 2015). Probably the most common use of the term sustainability, however, is in relation to sustainable development (Sikdar, 2003). According to Wilkinson et al. (2001), sustainability mainly refers to maintaining or renewing something specific. The challenge of how to become a sustainable organisation is a topic of considerable interest in the business sector, with studies linking improved performance to cultural factors surrounding sustainability (Perkins et al., 2012). Pearce et al. (2013) indicated that sustainability as organisational approaches aimed at achieving a balance between short-term organisational goals and long-term enterprise and social responsibility. In business, sustainability means managing human and natural capital with the same vigour we apply to the management of financial capital (White, 2005). Additionally, Wilson (2003) pointed out that while organisational sustainability recognises that organisational growth and profitability are important, it goes beyond the profit maximisation model and requires from organisations to pursue social, environmental and economic goals related to organisational sustainability.