Towards a Model of Sustainability Capabilities and Competitive Advantage

Firms have lately realized the importance of sustainability because of (1) decreasing resources (2) difficulty in getting adequate and skilled resources. Therefore firms are trying their best to include sustainability considerations in their operational, tactical and strategic planning. In this scenario, this paper makes an attempt to operationalize several kinds of resources existing in an organization from a sustainability perspective and tries to investigate which of these can best help the organization in developing sustainability capabilities which will eventually led the firm to gain competitive advantage. Based on the data collected from 204 executives engaged in different sectors, the findings indicate that except accounting resources, all other resources like information technology, finance, marketing and operations are significant in enabling the firm to develop sustainability capabilities. Relatively, operations resources and information technology resources are the most important predictors of sustainability capabilities and hence firms can focus more on these departments while strategic resource allocation. Finally, the study exhibited that sustainability capabilities do help a firm to gain competitive advantage.