Strategic Implications of Organizational Culture, Knowledge, Learning Organizations, and Innovation on Sustainable Organizations

This study aims to analyze the strategic implications that the organizational culture has on organizational knowledge, learning, and innovation. It begins from the assumption that there is a direct and positive relationship between the organizational culture and knowledge, learning, and innovation in organizations. It also is assumed that organizational culture, knowledge, learning, and innovation play a receptive to sustainable organizational practices. The method used is the appreciative inquiry as a collaborative dialogue based on the question of what is the best of and what might be that aims to design and implement innovations in sustainable organizational arrangements and processes. The theoretical framework is based on organizational cultural cognitivism theory and the theory of socio-ecological intergradation. It is concluded that sustainable organizations practices require the creation and development of an organizational culture supportive of knowledge, learning, and innovation practices.

Sustainable and Green Human Resource Practices

Two topics, circular economy and human resource practices, have been in separate baskets. However, recent studies have shown that both have a major impact either directly or indirectly on each other. Human resource management or human management is largely associated with a behavior of an economy. It has been largely debated and accepted that human resource management has a major role in creating sustainable organizations. Human resource management as a function involves a lot of postulates of sustainability in the scope of an organization. We all understand that the role of human resources has widened throughout time, and there is a need for more innovations in better management with various stakeholders and employees to create HR as a more solution-based function.

Organizational Culture, Knowledge, Learning Organizations, and Innovation on Sustainable Organizations

This study aims to analyze the strategic implications that the organizational culture has on organizational knowledge, learning, and innovation. It begins from the assumption that there is a direct and positive relationship between the organizational culture and knowledge, learning, and innovation in organizations. It also is assumed that organizational culture, knowledge, learning, and innovation play a receptive to sustainable organizational practices. The method used is the appreciative inquiry as a collaborative dialogue based on the question of what is the best of and what might be that aims to design and implement innovations in sustainable organizational arrangements and processes. The theoretical framework is based on organizational cultural cognitivism theory and the theory of socio-ecological intergradation. It is concluded that sustainable organizations practices require the creation and development of an organizational culture supportive of knowledge, learning, and innovation practices.

Do National Values of Culture and Sustainability Influence Direct Employee PDM Levels and Scope? The Search for a European Answer

The dynamic development of the global economy has led to the creation of agile and innovative organizations that need to adapt rapidly to new challenges. For that reason, organizations need to make decisions that help them face uncertain situations and be successful. Research has demonstrated that employee participative decision making (PDM) promotes more innovative, flexible, and sustainable organizations. The present paper examines organizational, cultural, and sustainable factors to discover how these variables affect PDM in the European context. For this purpose, this study focuses on two main objectives: (1) analyzing the impact of a country’s cultural and institutional values (macro level), beyond individual and organizational characteristics (micro and meso levels), on the adoption of PDM in the European context and (2) differentiating among the types of decisions for which employee participation is considered (operational or organizational). To attain these goals, three hierarchical fitted regression models were fitted using data based on the Sixth European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) and complemented with information from Hofstede’s dimensions, whose scores are obtained from 2010 Hofstede database, and institutional values from the 2015 World Competitive Yearbook (WCY). Results demonstrate that some cultural values are significant for PDM and that sustainability is related to employee participation at the general and operational levels. This allows the conclusion that organizations located in countries with greater sustainability awareness are also those that promote employee participation the most.

Cultural Values and Knowledge Sharing in the Context of Sustainable Organizations

The current research studied the relationship between cultural values and tacit and explicit knowledge sharing behavior in the context of sustainable organizations. The sample consisted of 751 workers from Colombian organizations. It was found that sharing explicit and tacit knowledge correlated with the cultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance, individualism–collectivism, and paternalism. On the other side, sharing tacit and explicit knowledge did not correlate with the cultural dimensions of power distance and masculinity–femininity. For organizational managers interested in knowledge sharing, a lesson is to facilitate environments of low uncertainty, care about the needs of workers, and have high collective values such as respect and interest in what others do. These values are essential for the promotion of knowledge sharing, which in turn contributes to sustainable organizations. From the theoretical point of view, the study opens a new line of research that integrates cultural studies and knowledge management to investigate the differential impact of cultural values on tacit and explicit knowledge sharing in organizational contexts.

ISO 9004 - A stimulating quality management standard for the creative leaders of contemporary sustainable organizations

International management standards can provide organizations with challenging opportunities only if they understand the intended aims and features of those standards and apply them creatively and integrated into their business management. For that to happen, the business leaders of the organizations play the key role. For this subject, this discursive article focuses on the ISO 9004 quality management (QM) standard, which is one of the international management standards, which can be applied to all kinds of organizations. In addition to the opportunities, this article discusses difficulties and pitfalls associated with the ISO 9004 standard, and their possible solutions in practical implementations. The authors highlight aspects of how ISO 9004 can be considered as the most challenging standard in the ISO 9000 series of the QM standards. However, many organizations, which have not acknowledged the differences and relationship of the ISO 9004 and ISO 9001 standards, often apply the ISO 9000 standards in inadequate ways and hence have not the ability to exploit the potential opportunities of the standards. Especially, ISO 9004 considers QM from the entire business point of view and aims at the quality of the whole organization. ISO 9004 standard can provide QM guidance to achieve sustained success even in complex, demanding and ever-changing contemporary business environments, including the challenges of the 4th industrial revolution. This article gives ideas and creative theoretical and practical views for the ISO 9004 implementations. The aim is to emphasize that, according to ISO 9004, the organization’s identity and its differentiating competitive advantages are the bases for the quality of the organization and its sustained success. In this context, each organization has its own and always existing QM realization, which cannot be separated from business management and which can be continually improved according to the organization’s business development strategies and practices. In this respect, the ISO 9004 can be seen as flexible and challenging. Based on the authors’ experience, QM targets can be achieved and developed in the most natural way through the principles and practices of the learning organization. In addition to the ISO 9000 standards, organizations also use other well-known managerial references, including performance excellence models and many various management system standards of the specific disciplines. All these may be seen as sub-domains within the ISO 9004 framework. ISO 9004 also can be used for diverse TQM and sustainability implementations. This article is based on the authors’ long experience in the practical promotion and application of the ISO 9000 standard in different kinds of organizations. The first author of the article has involved in the international drafting process of the ISO 9004 standard-editions since the 1980s. He also was a co-writer of a similar ISO 9004 article about twenty years ago. That article has been publicly available on the Internet, and its over one thousand recent readers evidence a growing interest in this standard. Moreover, after 2000, ISO 9004 standard has been revised twice and rewritten completely recently. Hence, it is well-founded to re-examine this subject again in this article.

The road to more sustainable firms in the face of a pandemic: Changes needed in employment relationships

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we operate at work. Dealing with these changes may require new ways of thinking about our models of employment relationships, to create more sustainable organizations during troubled times. Sustainability can be understood as an attempt to strike a balance between the economic, social and environmental goals of companies—a balance that could drive a global recovery from the pandemic crisis. This essay focuses on the employer’s perspective and considers how firms can use different employment models to improve sustainability during the crisis. We propose two alternative employment models which we label “Oversustainability” and “Mutual Sustainability” that depend on the choice of the firm’s competitive strategy (proactive/innovative vs analyzer/following). We considered the contributions expected from employees and the inducements they were offered under each model. We believe these employment models can be advantageous for companies seeking to adopt proactive and analyzer-type sustainability strategies. JEL CLASSIFICATION M1