The Halo Effect and Social Evaluation: How Organizational Status Shapes Audience Perceptions on Corporate Environmental Reputation

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 464-482
Author(s):  
Sangchan Park ◽  
Daegyu Yang ◽  
Hyeonjin Cha ◽  
Seobin Pyeon

Although firms generally strive to enhance social evaluations, scholars have noted that such evaluations may not completely reflect actual performance of the firms. Extending this approach to the domain of environmental sustainability, we focus on the importance of social evaluation heuristics and explore how a firm’s status, or generalized evaluation not directly linked to environmental performance, plays a key role in shaping audience perceptions on its environmental reputation. Using multiple sources of data on 178 global companies’ green reputation, status, and environmental performance, our study shows that a firm’s status significantly enhances its environmental reputation assessed by general consumers and that the status effect varies significantly according to media frames. These findings illuminate the richness and complexity in the relations between status, reputation, and media-provided information in the area of environmental sustainability.

Author(s):  
Ayansola Olatunji Ayandibu

Green transformational leadership has been identified as the most effective leadership style where the leader seeks to change the status quo by transforming the organization and also considers achieving environmental goals and inspiring followers to perform beyond expected levels of environmental performance. Drawing insights from the literature on transformational leadership, this chapter examines the influence of green transformational leadership on organizational behavior effectiveness and environmental sustainability. This chapter submits that organizations should be moving towards green innovation by formulating policies and embarking on strategies to meet customers' demands and satisfy environmental needs in the marketplace. Therefore, organizations should consider going green in all they do as this will also have a tremendous influence on the employees' green self-efficacy and impact on the society at large. The chapter concludes that organizational behavior effectiveness in recent times requires responsible business practices or solutions from those in leadership.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 219
Author(s):  
Abdulkarim Hasan Rashed ◽  
Suad Ahmed Rashdan ◽  
Ahmed Y. Ali-Mohamed

The industrial sector plays a vital role in economic development; therefore, there is a necessity to integrate sustainability into industrial development to maintain the economy and avoid any degradation impacts on the environment, and thereafter on society. Thus, do Bahraini companies have sustainability reports and if so, are these reports based on GRI guidelines? Has the status of their sustainability reports been analyzed? This research aims to examine the sustainability reports of companies by analyzing the status of sustainability aspects in their materiality matrices to assist in identifying and prioritizing the most significant sustainability issues for advancement in their future reporting and to improve their environmental performance. This study employs a content analysis approach and analyzes 11 reports from the period 2016–2020 for three companies in Bahrain’s large industrial sector. The study reveals that the companies using materiality analysis in their reporting benefit from better monitoring and measuring of their environmental performance, and from implementing SDGs. Furthermore, the study indicates that the utilization of a materiality matrix as a reporting tool can define and improve report contents by considering stakeholders’ views, consequently, improving the quality of the sustainability reports. The study concludes by proposing a set of recommendations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Li ◽  
Fengyin Xiong ◽  
Zhuo Chen

AbstractBiomass gasification, especially distribution to power generation, is considered as a promising way to tackle global energy and environmental challenges. However, previous researches on integrated analysis of the greenhouse gases (GHG) abatement potentials associated with biomass electrification are sparse and few have taken the freshwater utilization into account within a coherent framework, though both energy and water scarcity are lying in the central concerns in China’s environmental policy. This study employs a Life cycle assessment (LCA) model to analyse the actual performance combined with water footprint (WF) assessment methods. The inextricable trade-offs between three representative energy-producing technologies are explored based on three categories of non-food crops (maize, sorghum and hybrid pennisetum) cultivated in marginal arable land. WF results demonstrate that the Hybrid pennisetum system has the largest impact on the water resources whereas the other two technology options exhibit the characteristics of environmental sustainability. The large variances in contribution ratio between the four sub-processes in terms of total impacts are reflected by the LCA results. The Anaerobic Digestion process is found to be the main contributor whereas the Digestate management process is shown to be able to effectively mitigate the negative environmental impacts with an absolute share. Sensitivity analysis is implemented to detect the impacts of loss ratios variation, as silage mass and methane, on final results. The methane loss has the largest influence on the Hybrid pennisetum system, followed by the Maize system. Above all, the Sorghum system demonstrates the best performance amongst the considered assessment categories. Our study builds a pilot reference for further driving large-scale project of bioenergy production and conversion. The synergy of combined WF-LCA method allows us to conduct a comprehensive assessment and to provide insights into environmental and resource management.


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Szalavetz

Abstract Despite a consensus view in the literature about the importance of cross-functional collaboration (CFC) for corporate environmental performance improvement, there is a dearth of studies that explain how exactly sustainability-oriented CFC can foster this objective. The purpose of this paper is to explain the role of CFC in corporate environmental performance improvement. We do this by undertaking two rounds of literature review, developing a proposition after the first round and by collecting illuminative real-life examples that illustrate our arguments in the second round. We propose and illustrate that CFC can effectively address two systemic properties of corporate environmental performance: trade-offs and interdependencies among different aspects of corporate environmental sustainability. If left unaddressed, these systemic specifics would result in organizational, managerial, and behavioral outcomes, such as inertia, opposition to change, lack of information, and so on, which would turn into effective barriers to corporate environmental performance improvement. put CFC addresses these barriers through information sharing, knowledge building, and interest reconciliation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nina Helen Finigan

<p>Environmental sustainability is becoming an increasingly essential component of modern life. The contemporary museums’ role as public educators, and as guardians of tangible and intangible culture, places them in a unique position to address the various issues surrounding environmental sustainability, from climate change, to bio-diversity loss, to conservation. There is increasing momentum behind the idea that museums should not only engage with environmental sustainability, but that they indeed have a responsibility to. Although museums throughout New Zealand are addressing environmental sustainability, there is currently no thorough examination of how they are doing this. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation was so find out the current state of environmental sustainability in New Zealand museums, and specifically how staff are approaching it. Through engaging in a case study of Te Manawa Museum, Gallery and Science Centre, Palmerston North, and specifically the environmentally themed exhibition Te Awa/The River: Heart of the Manawatu, this dissertation analyses and discusses the realities of addressing institutional environmental sustainability. While the previous literature surrounding this topic has addressed the many reasons why museums should engage with environmental sustainability, this dissertation has expanded on this by analysing and discussing the realities of addressing environmental sustainability from a staff perspective. Through interviews with five Te Manawa staff members, this dissertation has revealed that while museum professionals agree that engagement with environmental sustainability should become part of bottom line holistic sustainable development, the status of museums as trusted democratic institutions can place them in a conflicted space ‘in-between’ when dealing with polarising issues such as the environment. This is particularly relevant to the discussion around new-museological theory, and the importance of local context and reflexive community engagement, where the community essentially help drive museological direction and content.</p>


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-102
Author(s):  
Youngho Chang ◽  
Jiesheng Tan ◽  
Letian Chen

Studies on sustainable development rely on diverse and seemingly conflicting concepts that yield contrasting results. The root of these conflicting concepts is the lack of agreement on the path toward achieving sustainable development (SD), namely, weak (or economic) versus strong (or ecological) sustainability. This article revisits the Solow-Hartwick model (Solow 1974, 1986; Hartwick 1977, 1978a, 1978b), which suggests that an economy can achieve intergenerational equity by mandating the Hartwick rule of investing the amount of rents from natural capital into renewable capital. It constructs a modified Solow-Hartwick model in which the assumptions of constant population and no technological progress are relaxed and from which it derives a more general form of the Hartwick rule. The modified Solow-Hartwick investment rule presents how weak sustainability can be attained and explains how the residual Hotelling rents (or proceeds from natural resources) could be utilized in order to achieve strong sustainability. In this article, we apply the modified Solow-Hartwick investment rule to a selection of developing and developed Asian economies to assess their sustainability. We then compare our results with two existing measures of sustainability, the genuine savings (GS) model and the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), both of which frequently present contradicting evaluations on the status of sustainability.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 2549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Bednárová ◽  
Roman Klimko ◽  
Eva Rievajová

This paper identifies factors influencing environmental disclosure and environmental performance of the top 100 Fortune Global companies. The analysis identifies whether they follow the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards to gain and maintain legitimacy with relevant stakeholders. Other factors such as sector and region are taken into account, with empirical testing of a model for the relationship between the extent of environmental disclosure (measured by the developed index based on GRI indicators), sector membership, region, and actual environmental performance. Evidence exists that the main factors related to actual environmental performance were the region and level of environmental disclosure.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 487-503
Author(s):  
J. Lotus Seeley

Research on queuing and waiting has demonstrated how these practices exemplify tacit norms of social organization and how the dynamics of deference embedded in waiting (re)produce the status of the waiting individual and/or the power of individuals in charge of queues. Less attention has been given to the broader effects of the agentic efforts of individuals to decrease their wait times and increase their priority in their original queue, what I term the active management of waiting. Using ethnographic and interview data on IT support workers at a large university, I document how high-status individuals engage in three active management of waiting strategies: trumping the queue, circumventing the queue, and refusing to queue. As I show, these strategies are patterned by organizational status and thus not only (re)produce the status of the waiting individual but also exert a disciplinary effect on servers and help (re)produce organizational status structures as a whole.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 161-179
Author(s):  
Anne Hetson ◽  
Brian M. Saxton ◽  
Mariah Webinger ◽  

Environmental sustainability in business has become a highly debated topic as societies decide how best to meet their economic needs and care for the earth. Catholic social teaching (CST) may add theoretical richness to the discussion. We examine solidarity, subsidiarity, and pursuit of the common good as dimensions of a heavy manufacturing, U.S.-based firm’s CST orientation. We find that measures of subsidiarity and common good predict a firm’s environmental performance consistent with CST principles. Results are of interest to academics, policymakers, and citizens who wish to advance the implementation of CST, environmental sustainability, or both.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 4187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zacharoula Andreopoulou ◽  
Christiana Koliouska

Sustainability constitutes a broad discipline that focuses on the social, economic and environmental impact of human activities. Many policies and strategies have been developed for the pursuit of environmental sustainability and the guidance to a green society. Many enterprises have taken meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance through corporate sustainability and environmental management. Environmental management contributes to significant improvements to environmental performance of the enterprises. This paper aims to evaluate the Renewable Energy Enterprises performance in the Internet in Thessaloniki Prefecture regarding the characteristics of sustainability using Multi-criteria Decision Analysis. TOPSIS method was used to provide a ranking of the Renewable Energy Enterprises according to their sustainability and finally conclude to a benchmark. According to the results of the research, the Renewable Energy Enterprises achieve a good level of sustainability but not the optimum. However, the entrepreneurs should adopt modern environmental policy, sustainable marketing, green network framework and certified environmental management system in order to consider their enterprise sustainable.


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